Talk to me. (TechTalk)

The premier edition of T&D's new quarterly column looks at speech-recognition technology.

Like everything else, they needed the survey yesterday--eighty-four questions, a five-point Likert scale angled at 90 degrees, and clear directions with examples. They said, "It has to fit on two pages, and we want the 'fold and staple' design, with the return address preprinted on the back. Oh yeah, and use plenty of white space."

Right! So there I was trying to polish off the last few design changes. Let's see--to insert the graphic, "click this, press Control-Alt Y, and...." The survey disappeared!

I yelled at my computer, "No! You're supposed to insert the graphic!"

I clicked the "undo" button. Oops, it couldn't undo.

I sighed and shut my eyes. Well, they said they wanted a lot of white space.

Luckily I had a back-up copy, so the story ended well. But wouldn't it be great if you really could tell your computer what to do? Forget the keyboard commands. Forget the icons. Just say, "Insert graphic, please," and there it is. And while we're dreaming, why not have your computer take dictation, too?

You say, "Take a letter for William." And your computer pulls up the letter format, inserts William's address, and displays on the screen whatever comments you utter.

You say, "Great. Now fax it." The computer opens the fax program, initiates the dial sequence …