Perhaps if Paramount had made that film a few years from now, audiences might not have perceived the intended humor in the presumption that the human voice should be a preferred interface to the infosphere , the infinite ocean of electronic information all around us. This change will be driven by multiple forces, chief among them device technology, software agents, speech technology, and structured knowledge. Currently, less than 2 percent of the global population routinely accesses the infosphere. As Microsoft is learning, shrinking a mammoth GUI to palm-size devices is not a sensible proposition. Neither, for many of us, is pen computing, now in its third or fourth incarnation.
Speech recognition continues to improve.
Of course, we will need intelligent, personalized services with which to talk on near-future networks, and that opens the door for software agents. The crucial point won't so much be whether agents are smarter than humans but rather that, unlike humans, they have infinite patience and can stay up all night. In short order, content will move from a single representation primarily for visual consumption to multiple representations appropriate to the end-user device or process doing the access. He is a writer and lecturer and is crazy over Java, Jini, his family, the PalmOS, guitar, and volleyball, though not necessarily in that order. Inc. All rights reserved.