You probably have heard about voice recognition that allows you to "talk"? to a computer, so that it can convert your speech into text. It has been around for more than fifty years now. Developments in voice recognition technology through the years has made it possible for a computer to recognize continuous speech, several voices and various speech patterns and even different languages.

There are three ways that voice recognition technology can meet your needs: command and control, dictation and text-to-speech capability.

In this kind of technology, your voice works as the input device. By uttering a command, you can navigate menus, toolbars and activate different applications. Likewise, you can also dictate words through a microphone and let the computer convert them into text instead of typing them through the keyboard.

Text-to-speech features in computers using voice recognition technology allow the computer to read the text that you have typed. The computer use "synthesizers"? to produce sound similar to a human's speaking voice. It then uses filters to imitate sound variations resulting from differences in the position of the tongue, shape of the lips and length of the throat, among others.

Even when this technology allows a computer to recognize human speech, digitize it into phonemes and words, "analyze"? the words based from their context and synthesize speech from text, the computer does not actually understand what you say. Understanding how human speaks would refer to a field of artificial intelligence that is called natural language processing.

While it is true that speech or voice recognition technology has y gone a long way since its conception in the 1920s, it has not yet achieved one hundred percent accuracy. Even the best-known software available in the market has not provided its users a very reliable and accurate solution to typing problems.

However, continuous efforts to develop this technology are being made, and this gives hope to a large number of people using this technology" ?physically disabled and normal people alike. Who knows, just few years from now using the keyboard may just be a history in the world of computers.