GM,
Right now people don't need 300 MHz Pentium II's just to check e-mail and type a document. But the voice processing (synthesis, but much more recognition and even more attendent natural language processing) will take a lot of silicon to do well, especially as they try to make it error-free and work in real-world environments (no headset, background noise, etc.). This won't be all in the CPU, but it'll be in silicon.
I bet that in 5 years, on new machines, voice will be much more common than spreadsheets are now, in that 9 out of 10 spreadsheets preinstalled on new systems aren't used. Voice will be used every time the PC is used, in about every app.
5 years from now, voice recognition will be common even on new PDAs and palmtops.
Voice recognition is a killer app, and it's coming very soon. (It's already here, but not quite lethally. :^> )
But most of the apps for silicon haven't been thought up yet. The best analogy is this: what would people do now if they had a staff supporting them everywhere they went?
--John |
