If you have sausage-sized fingers, find pen-driven handheld computers a fiddle or have never got the hang of predictive text on your mobile phone, a new chip might provide a sympathetic ear. It is being devised by a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California at Berkeley to do one thing, and one thing only: speech recognition. Using a new, hardware-based approach to the problem, the researchers hope to create a chip that performs speech recognition much more efficiently than is currently possible using software-based recognition systems. If they are right, it might soon become possible to dictate an e-mail into your BlackBerry, or edit your mobile phone's address book using voice commands alone.
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