IRT,
"I would think speech recognition software would drink hard disk capacity like water. A "killer app" in this field would be a godsend to the entire dd industry."
It could be that this is why Seagate recently announced that they would increase their investment in Dragon to 35% from 25%. And, to speculate a little, it could be why they changed their mind about purchasing Sandisk (as per Greg a couple of days ago, reporting on his conversation with Don Waite)--they may well feel that purchasing Dragon would be a better use of their money, and they are pushing voice recognition as fast as possible. Dragon's product is quite a bit different from disks and flash memory--not commoditized, a breath of fresh air to Shugart, Waite, et al, given recent developments, I'm sure. Of course, the current majority owners of Dragon would have to want to be part of Seagate for it to work. May or may not be in the cards.
Waite also said to Greg that drive capacities were increasing faster than the need for the space at the moment, but that that would change over time. Voice recognition could be one of the things that would drive demand for more space, along with multimedia generally (3D, video, etc. as with speech), and the general growth of the Web and databases. |
