>Philip Chien wrote: >> >> email sounds at least plausible - just search every bit transmitted in >> every possible form (wire, fiber optic, R-F). fax and voice are a little >> harder to believe - for fax it would require incredible optical character >> recognition capabilities and voice would require incredible pattern >> recognition. Certainly it's plausible to believe that the government would >> have capabilities far in excess of what's available to the public. Dave Mullenix <djmullen@facstaff.wisc.edu> >Call the NorthWest Airlines reservation phone at 800 447-4747. Their >phone tag system says, "For information on a new reservation, press or >say, 'One'." It works, too. You say "One" and you're switched to the >proper level for the next round of phone tag. There's several magnitudes of difference between recognising speaker-independent individual words with a fairly small vocabulary and actual normal conversations. And speaker-independent speech detection has been around for a couple of decades, and is available as a software package for most microcomputers. When it's actually feasible for a computer to interpet the sentence "One man won a one dollar bill for coming in first in the three legged race." or tell the difference between a thousand speakers saying "Have a nice day" and "Have an ice day" I'll be *very* impressed. Philip Chien, KC4YER Earth News world (in)famous writer, science fiction fan, ham radio operator, all-around nice guy, etc.