Wired - It's a recurring pipe dream for technophiles and luddites alike: computers that not only listen but understand our every command. And each year, like clockwork, someone claims this day is upon us—that we can toss out our keyboards and warm up our larynges for a new relationship with our machines.
Press or say "1" for a cold, hard dose of reality.
Despite being crammed into nearly every imaginable electronic receptacle—from cell phones and desktop operating systems to cars and aircraft cockpits—speech-recognition software remains light-years away from tackling the general- purpose applications that would change the way we interact with computers. Sure, we've seen modest improvements, but breakthroughs have been rare. One of the most recent occurred more than a decade ago: Rasta, developed at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, enabled different kinds of hardware to use the same speech-recognition software. It was widely implemented in mobile phones in 2001, and nothing game-changing has happened since.
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