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See BillG follow the DRY Principle

Stefan Tilkov,

Matthew Thomas has collected some of Bill Gates’s claims about speech recognition since 1997. His summary:

Speech recognition in computers will become mainstream by 2007. Or by 2002. Or by 2007, or 2008, or 2006, or 2003, or 2001, or Windows XP, or 2006, or 2004, or 2005, or 2004, or 2009, or 2010, or 2007, or 2010, or 2015, or 2008. You can count on it.

On December 29, 2005 8:50 PM, Doug said:

Heh. Back in 1981 I was playing with speech recognition on my old TRS-80 Model I. And what I learned was that speech recognition is NEVER going to take hold in the modern cubicle farm. The babble would be unbearable.

Speech recognition technology seems to be reasonably well advanced. An online acquaintance of mine uses voice almost exclusively for writing e-mails due to degenerative problems with his hands. Sometimes you get an amusing mistranslation, but by and large you wouldn’t know that he hadn’t typed them. Except for the absence of misspellings :-)

But in the office? No way. And can you imagine trying to write Java or Ruby using speech input?

On December 29, 2005 10:57 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

If at all, I see potential in controlling mobile devices — but I agree with your assessment regarding an office setting (or even at home - right now, my wife and I are both typing away at our respective computers, but talking at the same time [and not to each other]? No way).