In case you haven't noticed, the operating system wars are pretty much over. Going forward, there will be Windows and UNIX. This means the interesting play has moved somewhere else - to the man-machine interface.

Having recognized this, last week, IBM put some of its speech technology out into the open source marketplace. This counters Microsoft's Speech Server, which up until now has been the only real pure infrastructure play in the space.

I've been a Dragon user for a few months now, and the technology is way beyond where most people think it is. The paradigm for speech interaction with your computer still needs some work, but the underlying technology probably recognizes what i'm saying better than most humans.

With digital photography it is already possible to create man-made images that cannot be distinguished from naturally occuring scenes. Pretty soon we will be able to create man-made speech that's indistinguishable as well. When that happens, it's a whole new world... Even if you don't call your bank on the phone, voice I/O is in your future. Trust me.

Monday, September 13, 2004 10:24:22 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  News