- NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is investing big bucks to develop
systems that may soon give computers the ability to recognize and understand
human conversation, chairman Bill Gates saidMonday.
-
- He predicted that a decade from now personal
computers would be able not only to recognize speech, but to understand
it as humans do when they are conversing with each other. ``I'd be so bold
as to say that 10 years from now every personal computer will have seeing,
listening and learning,'' Gates said in a speech to the CA-World 1998 technology
conference.
-
- ``We (Microsoft) in the last eight years
have increased our pure research spending by a factor of 10. Today, it's
a very substantial investment on our part, and that's aimed at building
computers that see, listen and learn,'' Gates said. ``This is not a farfetched
idea. The idea of computers talking to us, recognizing our speech, has
been around for over 20 years. People at that time were overly optimistic
about how quickly it would take place because they thought we could solve
the problem simply by paying attention to the (speech) wave forms that
were coming in,'' he said.
-
- ``What they didn't know then that we
know now is that if you just look at things at 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,'' he told
the conference.
-
- ``So, it's by having the learning and
seeing what a typical conversation is like that the computer can start
to move up to human capabilities in this area,'' he said. Computers that
process information like humans will be easier to use and make today's
most powerful machines look clunky, he said. ``We'll look back on the machines
we have today, where the keyboard is the only way of getting the data in,
as very large and limited and wonder how people were able to work with
those,'' Gates said.
-
- Until the future arrives, Gates said
Microsoft is working to simplify computer usage by reducing such things
as the number of commands and formats required to perform tasks. ``We just
shouldn't have so many concepts,'' he said. The software giant's newest
version of the Windows operating system, Windows 98, is due out soon, but
a week ago the new system crashed when Gates was showing it off to a computer
industry convention in Chicago.
|
Sightings HomePage