The waitress exited, and he gave Laurence's knee a little squeeze. "Don't worry, I picked a nice variety. No appalling surprises, I promise."
* * *
"Amazing!" William Harrell said excitedly as the ISLE system looked up a name he asked it to find in its sample phone directory. "And what did you say ISLE stands for?"
"Intelligent Speech and Language Environment."
"Right," William said. "Tell me more about the recognition interface."
"It was what really shifted our focus on this whole new design," Peter began. Byron, Paul, and Rick sat at the table also, listening as Peter explained their design. "We had already decided that intelligent agents were the next big step in portable computers and devices, but it didn't seem like enough to us. We wanted more. And when we encountered the ISLE hardware and software, the pieces just sort of fell in place."
He paused for a moment, picked up the small black box sitting on the table before them. "In its final configuration, this circuitry will fit on one single PC card, that slides into one of the portable's available slots. It contains the core recognition software, speech synthesizer, and 74,000 word English language library. The card's extra RAM stores up to 5,000 additional words, such as last names or companies or terms you commonly refer to. Additional libraries, ones that are industry-specific, for example, medical libraries, can be stored on another PC card, or on the hard disk."
"Incredible," William said. "But really, do people want this sort of interface? Will they really use it? In tests we conducted in our labs, we found that while users often asked for speech recognition, few actually used it once we installed it on prototype systems. What makes this any different?"
Peter nodded in agreement. "You're right. It's true. While people think they want to be able to talk to a computer, have it take dictation, we believe what they really want is to give it simple commands to make certain small tasks simpler. But listen, instead of telling you all of this, why don't we show you instead. Guys?"
Paul and Rick arranged the hackneyed Joey Plus computer in front of William and Peter handed him a microphone.