Communications: One way to talk to computers: Voice commands to computers may substitute in part for conventional input devices

No longer the province of science fiction, machines that recognize and interpret spoken commands are now a commercial reality — and have been for more than three years. Fortunately for the human ego, such machines cannot (as yet) take over the operator's task. They do not really understand the words, but merely recognize them and perform preprogrammed assignments in response. The benefit of a simple system of this type is that it can be “taught” to recognize any language or accent. In other words, the machine is trained to understand the user — not the other way around.