Inner voice [Information Technology Voice Recognition]

Around 90 per cent of face-to-face communication is commonly believed to consist of body language - and only when you speak or email would you realise this. This explains why, as soon as the telephone was invented, the protocol of the 'telephone voice' was adopted. But a telephone conversation is still preferable to an email if you really want to convey the meaning of a message. There are subtle gradations in how we say things in business and in our personal lives. Thus it has always been a challenge for computers to recognise the human voice and the meaning in a sentence. The pioneering Dragon Speech Recognition software was invented in 1975 and first appeared on PCs for Microsoft DOS a few years later. The technology has advanced steadily in the intervening period and the software has changed ownership several times, most recently acquired by Nuance.