Sounds Familiar

After years of promise, voice recognition is at last becoming a significant method of using computers and accessing the Internet. Why now, and what difference does it make? Peter Day talks to the companies at the forefront of developments in the field (including Massachusetts-based Nuance, one of the largest makers of voice recognition technology), and asks whether our relationship with machines will change once we have the ability to talk to them.
[Picture: The IBM Shoebox, introduced in 1962, could understand 16 words: zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, minus, plus, subtotal, total, false, and off.]