So far you only key in commands to your computer. Soon you would be talking to it. Engineers all over the world are working day and night to better the technology of voice recognition so that man can just speak to his computer (instead of type to it!). And popular search sites like Ask Jeeves and TellMe Network hope to become "voice portals", letting users seek information by speaking simple phrases into the phone.

And why is speech going to become so important? Because in the next few years will begin the era of "pervasive computing", when the focus of digital software will migrate from desktop PCs linked to the Internet by phone wire to a plethora of newfangled, Web-ready products ranging from TVs and cell phones to dashboards and Palm Pilots. Then you will have the Internet in your pocket, anytime, anywhere. And as most of these devices will be too small to have a keyboard, the only way you're ever going to get lots of data into small devices is by talking to them.

Eventually computers will even talk to you. The 10-year horizon promises the birth of both natural-language software that "understands" many complex sentences and broadband data speeds that make online video ubiquitous. The average software product in 2010 could well have a face, a voice, ears and something resembling a brain, which suggests that our next great challenge will be figuring out what we really want to say.

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