Industrial workers on an assembly line can use their hands to inspect finished metal surfaces for divots while logging the results. In the medical field, patients can use voice to control wearable PCs monitoring vital statistics. Physicians can record patient information, pass such information back and forth between hospital departments or access medical records online in real time. Luckily for us, voice came of age just when we needed it to. Voice control is currently an option for ViA II users, but the company is considering adopting speech recognition as its wearable computers' primary interface.
ViA plans to open an office in Belgium's Flanders Language Valley next year.
ViA is convinced that speech recognition is becoming the nexus for a convergence of voice and data communications. In the coming years, Carroll said, voice will join the keyboard and the mouse as a standard interface uniting personal computing, e-mail, telephony and the full spectrum of handheld digital tools, such as cameras, planners, translation devices, and common household electronics such as stereos, TVs and VCRs. And once you're hooked on a very high-level speech recognition system, you aren't going to want to deal with the lower end devices using digital signal processors for which you have to memorize certain kinds of commands. You're going to want a very smart device that lets you talk to it like a friend and that does your bidding.