aybe it is not surprising that on a continent where everyone seems to be talking on the phone, all the time, even in the bathroom, one of the dominant trends among the hundreds of new developments at CeBIT is that more and more electronic gizmos are talking back to us.
Voice recognition technology, a field that has been around since before Bill Gates was born, has come of age. IBM is showcasing its Network Vehicle here, a van with a Web browser in the dashboard that will sort through the driver's latest email on voice commands. Lernout & Hauspie, a Belgian company, has put a SUI (speech user interface) into an auto navigation system, so that drivers who would never stop to ask directions can confess their confusion to a digital confidante in the privacy of their cars, and be guided to their destinations. For just $15 or so, the company has also produced a voice-activated device named Popeye that reads email aloud to busy owners, has a slang vocabulary rich enough to make it easier to talk to, and is programmed to take abuse from power surfers. Company officials boast that you can tell it to "cut the crap" and it will instantly toss aside what it is reading and move on to the next message.
Experts in the field are predicting that with a little more work, voice recognition devices will offer a formidable new type of transaction security, screening out any would-be imposters through precise digital recognition of individual human voices. If they are programmed like Popeye, though, the new devices may be reliable, but inside they'll be insecure.
-- Janice Castro
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