My Mac- You speak of people searching for companionship in computers, the feeling that one is interacting with another being. Some, lonely by choice and indeed some are physically unable to interact with humans due to debilitating illnesses or injuries. Most people can't get three other humans to sit down and play Hearts at the drop of a hat. The Macintosh fills that emptiness by providing a modicum of agreeable, pseudo-human interaction. Speech synthesis is nice, whenever I get TOO MUCH E-mail, I drop it on TexEdit and have it read it to me using Princess' voice and go about whatever work I need to do.
Voice recognition is a good idea, too.
I'd like to be able to reliably supplement mouse interaction with vocal instructions someday. Grab a copy of ResEdit. I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Geeze, I hate this question. No, man, it ain't.