Voice Recognition Starting to Come of Age

By Guy Harrison 

One of the funniest moments in the classic Star Trek motion pictures is the scene when the engineer "Scotty" - who has traveled back in time to the 1980s with his comrades - attempts to use a computer.  "Computer!" he exclaims, attempting to initiate a dialogue with the PC.  Embarrassed, a contemporary engineer hands him a mouse.  "Aha," says Scotty who then holds the mouse to his mouth only to again exclaim, "Computer!" The idea that computers in the future would be able to understand human speech was common a few decades ago.  Speech generation and recognition is so fundamental to the human experience that we tend to underestimate the incredible complexity of human information processing that makes it possible. 

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