Context August/September 2000 Issue -- Off The Cuff

"A single copy of the New York Times today contains as many new innovations and ideas as the average person would confront in a lifetime in the 17th century."
—Jim Taylor, management consultant.

"We are going nowhere fast. Average speed of vehicles through London, 1889: 11 mph. Average speed of vehicles through London, 1999: 11 mph."
—Sign on the wall in Britain’s Millennium Dome.

THE BAUD OF AVON

Some Internet wit, whose work was e-mailed to us anonymously, has composed "A Poem for Those Over 30." It’s not quite Shakespeare, but ’twill serve, ’twill serve.

A computer was something on TV
From a science-fiction show of note.
A window was something you hated to clean,
And ram was the cousin of a goat.

Meg was the name of my girlfriend,
And gig was a job for the nights.
Now they all mean different things,
And that really mega bytes.

An application was for employment.
A program was a TV show.
A cursor used profanity.
A keyboard was a piano.

Memory was something that you lost with age.
A CD was a bank account.
And if you had a three-inch floppy,
You hoped nobody found out.

Compress was something you did to the garbage,
Not something you did to a file,
And if you unzipped anything in public,
You’d be in jail for a while.

Log on was adding wood to the fire.
Hard drive was a long trip on the road.
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived.
And a backup happened to your commode.

Cut you did with a pocket knife.
Paste you did with glue.
A web was a spider’s home.
And a virus was the flu.

I guess I’ll stick to my pad and paper
And the memory in my head.
I hear nobody’s been killed in a computer crash,
But when it happens they wish they were dead.

‘WON’T YOU COME HOME, BILL BAILEY?’

Even as the U.S. relaxes visa requirements to allow more skilled foreign workers to enter the country, other nations are starting to take steps to get workers to come home. Ireland, home of legendary dramatists, is making an impassioned plea. For instance, during a recent speech on a trip to Australia, the Irish Prime Minister begged people with Irish roots to come home. There’s low unemployment in Ireland, and the economy is booming, he said. The Chinese are taking a more pragmatic approach. They’ve set up shop in Silicon Valley to entice the technically trained home again. The special office has been charged with promoting Beijing to Chinese students who are finishing their education in the U.S.

INTERVIEW

HAL, the chatty computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, gave all of us a vision of what a computer could be. Since then, computers have become enormously more powerful. Yet promises that they would recognize human speech have generally turned out to be more hype than honest-to-goodness progress. Well, HAL is still a ways off, but recently communication between man and machine has made great strides. Finally.

Back in the early ’80s, when IBM introduced a dictation system, it worked only if an extensively trained user spoke to it. It recognized just 5,000 words. The equipment took up an entire room. Some recent models, by comparison, have a vocabulary of 250,000 words, can be used by just about anyone, and can run on standard PCs.

Computers are also doing a much better job of understanding how all those words fit together to form ideas. Because of advances in "natural language" processing, people can increasingly ask questions the way they would naturally, rather than having to formulate a highly structured query.

What do these improvements mean? And what’s next? For answers, Context turned to Jo Lernout, co-founder and co-chairman of Lernout & Hauspie, a leading developer of speech-recognition technology.

CONTEXT: How will the ability to speak directly to a device and have it respond change the way people interact with technology?

JO LERNOUT: People will likely use personal computers more because they will be able to do several tasks almost simultaneously, some via the keyboard and others via voice.

Where the dialogue between users and machines will totally revolutionize use is in the world of mobile phones and other devices that don’t have a real keyboard. Maybe you have something in your car that connects you on-line, or your television links to the Internet. It’s hard to imagine sitting in your car or in front of your TV with a keyboard on your knees. So, the usefulness of those on-line connections is currently limited. With natural-language interfaces, though, using these keyboardless devices will be much simpler. More people will use them. People will also use them more effectively. Busy people never have the chance to read product manuals and can’t take advantage of all the available functions on devices, but now they won’t even have to think about how to use these things. They’ll just ask the device to do what they want.

A wireless device will become a type of personal assistant. When you need to send an e-mail, you can just say what you want to say and have your phone send it. When you want to find the answer to a question such as, "What’s the weather like in Boston?" you could just take a few seconds and ask your phone. You’d get a rapid response.

CONTEXT: What’s the next big thing on the horizon?

LERNOUT: User interfaces will become more sophisticated. For phone and car applications, developments will come in the next few months. Some improvements with your TV or in your refrigerator and microwave may be a few years away, but they’re coming. You’ll be able to tell your microwave, "I have a two-pound chicken. Cook it." And that’s it. Today, honestly, I don’t know how to program my microwave for a two-pound chicken. I don’t know how long it should be in there. The oven will know.

CONTEXT: How can senior executives take advantage of the emerging technology?

LERNOUT: For any business with a Web component, I would be building in natural-language capabilities, so people could interact with the site simply by talking. I should be able to say to Amazon, "I want to buy a new book." A digital assistant at the Amazon site should then ask, "Do you remember the title?" I should be able to respond, "I think it’s The Age of Intelligent Machines." There should be enough natural-language capability to help me to find that book and order it.