Testing done by Ziff Davis has revealed that if this is done thoroughly, these products will yield dictation accuracy of 87 percent to 90 percent at a rate of about 70 words per minute. In spite of the difficulties, speech recognition is slowly improving and practical applications are being found. Sears is planning to roll out a call-routing system that will work with a human backup next year. Another area where voice recognition is making inroads is with automobile-based cell phones. A potentially big application involves recognizing not the speech but the speaker.
Every person has a unique speech fingerprint that can be used for identification purposes.
This fingerprint, which can be stored in a smartcard or in a database, can be used to verify the person s identity. So get ready to talk to your computer. It's happening slowly, so any meaningful conversation may be a long way off. But eventually it will happen.