Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates believes that in the near future PCs will not only recognize speech but also understand it as humans do when they are having a conversation. I’d be so bold as to say that ten years from now every personal computer will have seeing, listening and learning, he told the CA-World 1998 technology conference. Gates said that in the last eight years, Microsoft had increased its pure research spending by a factor of ten. Today that’s a very substantial investment on our part but it’s aimed at building computers that see, listen and learn. Gates did not appear to be arguing that computers would have near-human qualities – but they had to develop other facilities if they are to ‘understand’ speech. In the past, he said people had been overly-optimistic about how quickly computers could understand speech because they thought it was simply a matter of understanding the speech wave forms. What they didn’t know then that we know now is that if you look at things on that level – the sound level – speech is very, very ambiguous. It is only because of common sense and context that people are able to figure out what’s being said. So it’s by learning and seeing what a typical conversation is like that that the computer can move up to human characteristics in that area. He forecast that in the future, people would wonder how it was possible to work with a computer where the keyboard was the only way of getting data in.
