The promess of Voice Recognition has never been the actual transcripting of the spoken word - although even that would be quite useful if a high degree of accur

The promess of Voice Recognition has never been the actual transcripting of the spoken word - although even that would be quite useful if a high degree of accuracy is achieved - but rather in the idea of controlling a computer by simply talking to it using natural language. People want the computer to behave as if it is a colleague, not a machine. Of course we're a long way from that goal. Firstly, people don't understand just how difficult it is to express clearly what it is that you want. I have a good friend that had bought an iPhone whilst she was living abroad for 6 months. On returning back home, she wanted to be able to add new songs to her iPhone without losing the stuff already on there. That's how she described the task to me, as the go-to person for computer problems. So I started asking a bunch of questions - do you still have the same computer that you were using abroad? Do you want copy the music already on the iPhone onto your computer? What about other data on the iPhone, do you need to recover that too, or can I blow it away? She got very frustrated with all of these questions and finally just snapped "Oh, you know what I mean, I just want to be able to use my iPhone normally, including adding new stuff to it!" Sigh. She really didn't (doesn't) understand that this just isn't enough information for me to work with - and that's me, as a walking talking human being with a strong understanding of what the computer is doing. How is a computer, with problems in transcribing the spoken words, let alone understanding the underlying meaning of those words, and not having any idea of the real world context of the problem, supposed to figure out what she wanted?