Just now, Victor Zue's computer sits on his desk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science— but he doesn't expect it to stay there much longer. Computers are already beginning to shrink drastically while they multiply in number. In as little as two years, Zue predicts, they will literallyfall off the desktop. He believes tiny but powerful computers will soon be embedded in the walls of offices and homes, in handheld devices that look like cell phones, and in even the most mundane appliances. The refrigerator of the near future, you may have read, will be able to remind you of what you're low on. What you may not have read is that it will order it for you on the Internet. You can already give a travel destination to a luxury automobile— with the right option— and it will direct you where you want to go, turn by turn. Even the lowly alarm clock will soon develop a computer-assisted attitude: Connected to the Internet, it will be able to check your schedule, cross-reference it with traffic reports, and decide what time to wake you up. Zue says that "even more remarkable than the things we'll be doing with all these computers will be the way we interact with them. We won't be typing on keyboards. Instead, we'll be speaking to them."
And they'll be speaking back. A computer that talks has long been an elusive goal, one that has had less to do with science than with Hollywood, where the prototype was HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as computers become more commonplace, they remain difficult to communicate with, as those who have struggled with a keyboard or dialed their way into oblivion through a voice-mail tree well knows. Those problems would disappear if computers could be programmed to converse with humans.
"Speech is the simplest and fastest form of human communication there is," says Zue, an associate director of the MIT computer lab. "If we could talk to computers, then virtually anyone could use them, without any training at all."
And our working and personal lives would never be the same.
Not long ago, computers were huge collections of vacuum tubes, wire, resistors, and capacitors. The first general-purpose electronic digital computer, built for the U.S. Army in 1946 to calculate ballistic tables, weighed more than 30 tons and contained more than 17,000 vacuum tubes. Because of their expense and unwieldy size, early computers— which came to be known as mainframes— served many people. Each person connected to the computer by a terminal had to compete for time. The arrival of the personal computer in the late 1970s eventually rearranged the equation to a 1-to-1 ratio of computers to people. And now the equation is changing again, so the ratio will soon be many computers per person.
