webber@porthos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) (01/04/90)
Assuming that technological growth in cheap processing power and fast storage will allow relatively brute force extrapolation of current 100 word voice recognition systems into reasonably full natural language voice recognition, the following will happen: 1) Managers who have traditionally resisted keyboard interfaces will embrace voice interfaces after a Harvard Business School study shows that the increased tension/hostility traditionally associated with email communication networks is reduced/nullified by voice input and output. 2) Said managers will use a system that receives their normal voice, translates it to standard text, converts the standard text to an authorative professionally-trained voice style (with an interactive editor where the system plays the speech back to the user who supplies comments about where emphasis, etc., should be adjusted). Employees will translate said pronouncements into text and then play them through an Elmer Fudd synthesizer. 3) 60% of the messages on Usenet will have been filtered thru a system based on data extracted Kathleen Turner's Jessica Rabbit voice from a Roger Rabbit video tape before posting. This will result in a major lawsuit from Touchstone Pictures that will result in the death of Usenet news (but this will be little felt since there will be sufficient bandwith to maintain million reader mailing lists). 4) Directional microphones and whispering will solve most of the problems traditionally supposed for voice i/o. Federal Building codes will require one water fountain per 100 square feet of inhabited floor space. Water quality of said fountains will be a major health issue. The manufacture of throat lounges will be a major growth industry. 5) People who interact with computers more than 4 hours per day will increasingly resort to surgical implant of sensors near the muscle groups controlling voice and use subvocalization for computer interaction. 6) Muscle problems associated with typing will decrease. This will make computer screens a focal point of health complaints. Standard computer interfaces will abandon reliance on computer screens. Usage of screens will be comparable to usage of blackboards and scratch paper. Some people will find it necessary to see what they are doing in order to think it out. Others will be doing things that don't require this. Still others will simply have better memories and not see the point of using screens (people capable of memorizing plays/poems/... will have a sought-after skill). 7) A history of the twentieth century will be written, submitted to a major publisher, and become a paperback best seller by a person who never ``saw'' any version of the book. Said person will have done all the work associated with the book while tending to a private vegetable garden. The importance of food production technology in the twentieth century will be a major theme of the book. 8) Most of the conversion of printed texts to computer manipulability will be accomplished by people subvocalizing while reading said texts (Library of Congress tapes for the blind will be quickly brought online). It will be observed that most people read faster and remember longer texts that they read out loud. Many studies be will done on verbal versus visual thinking. Much confusion will result. 9) Books will be printed with numbered paragraphs so that spoken notes can be easily associated with specific locations in the text. This will be the standard way scholars record comments on articles/books that they read. Hypertext will never make it, but there will be a revival of printing books with marginal notes (occasionally this will be nested so that a page will show a portion of text, commentary on that text, and finally commentary on the commentary via nested margins). Many books will be printed on demand and then recycled as soon as read (bookstores will collect deposits on books sold). 10) Studies indicating the emotional persuasiveness of vocal communication will ensure that there will be an elite group of people who force vocal communications into text form before considering their content. What began as a preference in the handling of computer vocal mail will extend to face-to-face vocal communications (some people will intentionally deafen themselves to the actual aural transmission and refer only to the derivative text form). 11) Recording every word one says during the day and reviewing it at evening will become a major fad among the elite. Family therapists will recommend the sharing of such tapes among family members. The discussion of the advisability of sharing such tapes with a person one is dating will be a major topic of discussion in net.singles. 12) The study of verbal behavior will become a recognized social science and a common liberal arts major -- it will be called Rhetorictology. 13) Parents will outfit children with verbal recorders with the intent that the children will grow up with access to every word they spoke or heard in their lifetime. 14) Privacy issues associated with verbal recordings will be handled primarily by the honor system. There will be a number of people who will refuse to have anything to do with this technology due to this problem. Many laws will be passed. There will be much confusion. 15) A common device for ``securing'' one's personal records will be to encrypt them and enter the key via a small keypad that one accesses by reaching into the enclosure of the recording device (so that the motions are not visible to anyone nearby). Said key will be forgotten by the system (along with all decrypted material in buffers) as soon as the last key in the series is released. 16) A large number of people will go to jail for refusing to tell a court what their encryption key was. Some courts will hold that erasing records when arrested constitutes tampering with evidence. Many laws will be passed. There will be much confusion. --- BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)
scratch@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Steven J Owens) (01/18/90)
In article <Jan.4.04.56.04.1990.10021@porthos.rutgers.edu> webber@porthos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) writes: > Employees will translate said pronouncements into text and then play them > through an Elmer Fudd synthesizer. > 3) 60% of the messages on Usenet will have been filtered thru a system > based on data extracted Kathleen Turner's Jessica Rabbit voice from a Roger > Rabbit video tape before posting. Cute, really cute... > 12) The study of verbal behavior will become a recognized social > science and a common liberal arts major -- it will be called > Rhetorictology. Where're the smileys?? As a communications major, having taken classes such as Theory of Rhetoric and Rhetorical Processes, I'm afraid I find this idea of yours a bit quaint, but amusing. It may well be that the rise of voice-controlled computers and the new availability of hard data to base research on may pump new life into solid applied research on rhetorical processes. And a new area of specialty pertaining to those specific proceses may well come into being. But I think you'll find that there are already plenty of people who have worked in that area - you'd be amazed at what has already been learned about interpersonal communication, something which people take very much for granted. I have some comments about a possible direction for computer interfacing, but I'll post that separately... Steven J. Owens | Scratch@Pittvms | Scratch@unix.cis.pitt.edu "There's a long hard road and a full, hard drive / And a sector there where I feel alive / Every bit of every byte / Is written down once on the night / Networking, I'm user friendly..." -- Warren Zevon, Networking, Transverse City