Its Master'S Voice

EE February 1987 Dragon dictates It is quicker to read a book than have it read to you. But it is quicker to make a speech than to write it. In an ideal world, therefore, busy businessmen would receive information on paper and impart it in speech. But they do not, because the spoken and written word re- main separate. The door be- tween them is guarded by the formidable power of the typing pool. Not many years from now, those typists will have been replaced by machines. There are already devices on the market that fac- tory managers can use to re- cord stocks or orders, or that car-telephonists can use to dial numbers by voice. Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, a small company based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and founded by Dr Ray Kurzweil, has taken this idea a stage further and has sold 400 of what it calls "voice systems". A voice system can learn how an in- dividual speaks 1,000 words and then turn any word it hears into the same set of signals as a keyboard would deliver to a pe...