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Pastimes : A New Era - Consider the Possibilities -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Carol who wrote (60)	4/28/1998 12:06:00 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 272

Carol, here's an interesting article... Bill Gates says PCs will have human capabilities Copyright c 1998 Nando.net Copyright c 1998 Reuters News Service NEW ORLEANS (April 27, 1998 11:25 p.m. EDT nando.net) - Microsoft Corp. is investing big bucks to develop systems that may soon give computers the ability to recognize and understand human conversation, chairman Bill Gates said on Monday. He predicted that a decade from now personal computers would be able not only to recognize speech, but to understand it as humans do when they are conversing with each other. "I'd be so bold as to say that 10 years from now every personal computer will have seeing, listening and learning," Gates said in a speech to the CA-World 1998 technology conference. "We (Microsoft) in the last eight years have increased our pure research spending by a factor of 10. Today, it's a very substantial investment on our part, and that's aimed at building computers that see, listen and learn," Gates said. "This is not a farfetched idea. The idea of computers talking to us, recognizing our speech, has been around for over 20 years. People at that time were overly optimistic about how quickly it would take place because they thought we could solve the problem simply by paying attention to the (speech) wave forms that were coming in," he said. "What they didn't know then that we know now is that if you just look at things at that level, the sound level, speech is very, very ambiguous. It is only because of common sense and context that people are able to figure out what's being said," he told the conference. "So, it's by having the learning and seeing what a typical conversation is like that the computer can start to move up to human capabilities in this area," he said. Computers that process information like humans will be easier to use and make today's most powerful machines look clunky, he said. "We'll look back on the machines we have today, where the keyboard is the only way of getting the data in, as very large and limited and wonder how people were able to work with those," Gates said. Until the future arrives, Gates said Microsoft is working to simplify computer usage by reducing such things as the number of commands and formats required to perform tasks. "We just shouldn't have so many concepts," he said. The software giant's newest version of the Windows operating system, Windows 98, is due out soon, but a week ago the new system crashed when Gates was showing it off to a computer industry convention in Chicago. ______________________________________________________________________ Michael