Nonetheless, as technology continues to invade the home, a battle for the home-automation market is brewing. Three competing organizations are proposing communications protocols for home appliances. Whether the appliances have anything to say to each other, however, remains unclear. New processors can finally provide the horsepower for this task. The question now is whether software designers can find compelling uses for the technology.
Most systems simply use voice recognition to trigger menu commands.
So unless you normally have your hands full, it's not much of a win - it just annoys your neighbors. Besides, being able to recognize voice just makes a computer's inability to understand speech that much more obvious. The Return of Mainframes Mainframes fell out of fashion for the same reasons that cars from Detroit did. The monoliths came to be seen as old-fashioned and clunky. Yet these systems were plagued with unreliability, breakdowns, and other problems.