Interacting with Computer Technology - Essay Example

Students simply put their thumb on the reader, their print is recognized, and their account is charged for the lunch. In 1965 Gordon Moore made a prediction that computer technology would double about every two years. Specifically, Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years and that chip size would gradually become smaller. More capacity would open up the possibility to run more and more complex programs. The increased capacity was achieved by each chip having the ability to hold more and more transistors over time.

Moore's law is very important because the computer technology of the 1960s would need to increase capacity to handle programs such as speech recognition and facial recognition programs. . Moore's law has held true. Chip technology has doubled capacity at approximately two-year intervals since 1970. Intel's Dual-Core Itanium 2 Processor holds approximately 1,000,000,000 transistors compared to the 8088 processor of the '70s which held approximately 15,000 transistors. Speech Recognition A keyboard/mouse interface with computer systems is a design that followed the logical progression from typewriters to computer-based word-processing programs.

But, this interface does not replicate how people communicate with one another. Natural communication is verbal and includes facial recognition as well. As computers have become integrated into just about every sector of society their uses have become more varied (away from simple word-processing). It is only logical that interfaces should change and evolve as well. Speech recognition technology moves users away from keyboard/mouse interfaces and toward an interface that is more natural for the user.

A speech recognition program includes both synthesizers and recognizers. These two devices replicate human interaction by taking human speech and turning it into text (recognizer) and taking text and turning it into speech (synthesizer). Anyone who has used computerized telephone answering services knows that, although recognizable as speech, computers do not do an adequate job of replicating tones of voice or accents found in normal speech patterns. The most up-to-date speech recognition program on the market is Window's Vista.