Emit..add this:Speech recognition to be next wave in IT
( 2001/3/28)
Speech recognition will be the next wave in the global information technology (IT) industry, said Michael Dertouzos, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science.
With the Internet only reaching a paltry five percent of the world's population, Dertouzos said speech recognition would open the doors to more than half of the world.
"There are over one billion Chinese, who cannot easily use keyboards because of the large number of ideograms," he said. "Perhaps more important, we could open that door to another billion or two people who can neither read nor write."
Speaking at a conference in Taipei yesterday on how to excel in a knowledge-based economy, Dertouzos said he believed Taiwan should capitalize on its strong manufacturing base by offering a forum where anyone around the world could buy a product from any Taiwan manufacturer at anytime.
Though he noted that this would require Taiwan companies to come together and work out the details, he added that this solution might help in allaying the nation's fears about the increasing competition from mainland China.
But for the rest of the world, the next wave of the IT revolution will be the automation of office work.
"During the second wave of the industrial revolution, we went around replacing muscle work with motors," said Dertouzos, who believes the same to be true with today's white office work but adding that the process will take most of the 21st century.
by The China Post, the leading English language newspaper in Taiwan.
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