Oliver_Henniges - 1:19 pm on Apr 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

I do appreciate what these programms might do for disabled people. I also think that there will be a number of forthcoming interesting applications concerning those voice-recognition- and location-based tools. Indeed googles announcements on tools for mobile phones should be followed with much care.

On the other hand I doubt anyone is using such tools for doing e.g. Php-scripting or other programming.You don't need to study linguistics to know that phonetic ambiguities will mulitply the sAND-problem and related issues. I guess for each problem solved (like the paradigm lexipixel gives) there will be two new ones you didn't have without voice-recognition. Natural language is a Hydra, just like Al Qaida seems to be.

Ten years ago: that's quite exactly the time when I stopped further research on the promises of understanding natural languages. Sometimes I'm quite fascinated when I see the progress, that has been made since then, for instance googles translation tool. But then I recognize all these funny little mistakes...

There are very fundamental limits to computers understanding natural languages. You can use ordinary language to discuss about language and build theories about language and in most cases it is implicitly clear what level you refer to in each sentence. Comparably, you can edit a text via voice in your preferred editor and additionally you have an escape-sequence for your format-options. Now imagine you were writing a manual describing how to use this escape-option. Try to do that without using your keyboard.