Speech recognition -- converting the user's speech to a text sentence of distinct words.

Language understanding – breaking down the recognized sentence grammatically, and systematically representing its meaning.

 Information retrieval – obtaining targeted data, based on that meaning representation, from the appropriate online source.

 Language generation -- building a text sentence that presents the retrieved data in the user's preferred language.

Speech synthesis -- converting that text sentence into computer-generated speech.

            Soon we will also be able to surf the web on our telephones; I mean by using our voices. You will simply dial a number for a site and then ask a question. A computer will then answer your question. Instead of viewing a page you will hear it from a human computerized voice. This idea is called a voice portal and is being developed by M.I.T. researchers, who estimate that this new technology will be implemented by 2001.

          Voice recognition also has one other purpose that is very important- security. Forget typing in all those long passwords, your own voice is your access key. However, there are some drawbacks with this technology. What if you're sick and your voice sounds different than normal, will your computer still be able to recognize you? What if someone recorded your voice and simply played it back in front of the microphone?

            Further into the future, the voice recognition/command technology will be implemented into other technologies like M.I.T.'s "invisible walls"; the "invisible walls" project is being developed to make computers virtually invisible to the eye. (Click here to find an article about "invisible walls") Or, you can imagine that you will be able to tell your car where you want it to take you? The possibilities are endless.

            Until then, we can all just imagine the futuristic possibilities and still use a computer with the keyboard and the click of the mouse.

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