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[Blog credit: Sweta Ramachandran of ERA for sparking the discussion on Kane and Abel]

Speech detection is hot and happening. Microsoft is hard at work getting their speech identification tools right. While all the work is going around in getting voice, ink and electronics to meet at a point, I think it would be worthwhile extending this to our everyday human-human interaction.

Losing your train of thoughts and getting distracted is easy. Often times, we find ourselves talking about a certain something only to be pulled away from it due to a hundred and one reasons. When we finally decide to get back to the main theme of discussion, it is not surprising to find that we can’t exactly remember where we left off.“I’m sorry, where was I?” Teachers, doctors, directors, politicians, engineers, mothers and zoo keepers: we’ve said that line at some point of time.

It must be evident to you by now that we’re relying less and less on our memories for remembering things. There’s Wiki and there’s Google and there’ll be several other morphs of these in years to come. Our minds are increasingly migrating towards activities such as strategizing, designing etc. that require more of lateral thinking. In a nutshell, the human mind will begin to do what all attempts at getting a machine to do has proved unsuccessful. I’ll give you a few examples:

1) Wine Tasters or coffee tasters. (A machine could never tell the fine difference between 30 varieties of coffee as precisely as a connoisseur of coffee could).
2) The human nose. (Getting a machine to differentiate between various odors is a difficult task, though nanotechnology is beginning to make replacements for the human olfactory systems possible).
3) Human stupidity. (Think of Albert Einstein’s famous quote: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Now, think of ICC’s recent ’20 Greatest’ list.)

But while researchers are hard at work, here’s my pathetic hypothesis. It’s the kind of forward looking stuff that a million others are hypothesizing as I write this. But I come in a minority since I took the pain to write it. And a handful of us will go onto making a prototype and test it. There’ll be a rare one or two will give up their social life to commercialize this kind of stuff. And that’s when, I’ll tell my kids, “Your Dad thought about this when he was 22. Imagine how rich we’d be now if I had sucked up to my idea.” (Well, not exactly in those words).

Here's the technology, folks. Every human mouth will have implanted in it a small little micro speech-to-text converter device with a built in projector. This device may be turned off and on with a button that will be placed in ‘another’ part of the body. Assuming that the little converter device is on as you speak, what you say will appear in text form on a 3” X 5” black display screen (the kinds that appears to be suspended in thin air), Johnny Quest style. Green robotic font. As you keep rambling on, real time transcription will occur and the scroll bar will keep moving down. In case you get distracted and lose your train of thoughts, all you’d need to do is the scroll up using your index finger and continue from you left off.

That's tomorrow’s technology, by the way.