Just talk

For years, I made a living trying to predict what might come next in the technology world. I got to play with lots of different gadgets that could be controlled in many different ways - with keyboards of all shapes and sizes, mice, touch pads, touch screens, tracker balls, joysticks and even a strange gimmick that claimed to allow you to control a computer with your "brain waves".

But I always found myself most fascinated by the idea of being able to talk to a computer. You see, my favorite way of communicating is talk - face to face - to another person. I like not only to be able to use words, but also wave my hands around, vary the speed, tone and inflection of my voice - and generally make delivery of the spoken word as rich an experience as I can.

I've also been given opportunities, once in a while, to do a little acting - and, when you're on stage, you've only got your voice and body to do the communication for you. The writer, the director and the other actors can all help, but when the spotlight (literally or figuratively) is on your character - you are on the hook for communicating whatever needs to be communicated. And whether that is a line, a shrug of the shoulders, a meaningful glance - or an intense glare - the audience will understand what you mean if you delivery it properly.

I bet you're wondering where I'm going with all of this. It all started with a recent experience with the Kinect for the Microsoft Xbox 360. Kinect includes a camera and a microphone that allow you to control the Xbox 360 by waving your arms, moving your body and speaking into the microphone from anywhere in the room.

In the interests of full disclosure, I do work at Microsoft, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with what I want to say right now. The point is that I've been using the Kinect as the only method of controlling my Xbox 360 for the last few weeks (since one of my college-age sons mistakenly walked off with all the conventional controllers when he was home for winter break). I use it to play games, to watch TV shows and movies - and even to get some exercise with one of the sports games.

And when I'm watching a TV show and want to pause it. I just say "Xbox, pause" and the show pauses. If I get a little hoarse from yelling at the Xbox, I can move my hands around so that an on-screen hand points and lingers on an on-screen "play" button. It really is pretty darn cool.

What struck me about all this is that my traditional concept of how voice could and should be used in computing was around "speech to text recognition" - which was focused on allowing people to "dictate" into their computers using voice recognition technology.

Although the technology for that works pretty well now, I don't use it - nor do I know many people who do. I don't know whether it's because people feel stupid dictating things into their computers - or simply because they don't speak the way they write. For me, the latter has always been the stumbling block.

At my best, I like to write the way I talk. But doing things that other way around is not something I've ever been easily able to master. In my world, I suppose I don't really want to talk to my computer, I just want to tell it what to do.

Computer... Off.