@ StDoodle:

Considering that speech in humans is only 99% accurate, speech as a sole solution to computing has a long time to go.

@ Arlo James Barnes:

Well, I guess it depends on the message board type you use. If it is an extensible one there might be already a plugin like that for it. I use this WordPress plugin to get the browser icons/flags on comments. It’s actually based on this browser detection plugin and the EasyIP2Country plugin. All of these are slightly outdated (as WordPress plugins sometimes get) – especially the browser detection gets confused when people post from ipads and kindle fires and such. I keep meaning to fix it myself, but… Eh… Lazy.

I mean, it is a rather simple thing – all you need to do is some pattern matching against the user-agent and use the right icons. I think the EasyIP2Country thing is open source so you will likely be able to rip off the IP matching patterns and adapt them to whatever you need for the message board.

@ Luke Maciak:
Well, I think both Iron Man and every futurist technology video ever made since computer graphics got acceptable take cultural cues from animation and computer graphics itself. The fact is, why things like these get made is because they are really fun to make. You have a POV-RAY plugin? Make a bright glowing screen! I have a friend who does such things (pictures of HUDs on schoolmates, et cetera) and he does not do it to provide a faithful representation of what technology could or should or might be, but of what looks cool. It comes straight out of Hollywood, which is fine, but when people said “That is cool! I want that!” and tech producers obliged is how stuff like this got rolling.
By the way, I am sure you fend this question off all the time (maybe you should put it prominently in your about page, which I did read once a while ago when I first found TI) but how would I go about getting OS/browser icons on forums/blogs I control?

@ StDoodle:

I highly recommend reading Rainbow’s End which describes exactly the type of interface you describe – where power user can bind complex functionality to casual muscle twitches and micro-movements.

@ Agnosis:

I fixed your link. Also, I LOL’d.

StDoodle wrote:

but I could envision a future where all sorts of complicated gestures can take the place of many lines’ worth of typed commands.

Well, thanks to google, that future is already here!!

Oh, it’s colorful! It’s 3D (in a very few places)! It must be the future.
But: if this is the future I stay in the present where I get most of these features now.

The comment from Mart made me laugh:
[…]the “future-tech” shown above seems too similar to what I’ve seen in Iron Man.

True, so true!
Overlays over the physical world are implemented in most smart phones (layar in android, for example) and so… this is pointless. Well, why do I wonder. It’s Microsoft :/

I think speech recognition will eventually get to the point where it can take over for most common tasks, much like you can accomplish most common tasks in MS software using a mouse and the ribbon. But there will always be a place for an advanced interface for “power users.” Today that mostly means direct text-command input, but I could envision a future where all sorts of complicated gestures can take the place of many lines’ worth of typed commands.

Combine the two well, with specicially macro’d text and gesture input, and we’ll be friggin’ computer wizards! (Not just a pun, well yeah, but I mean we’ll look like wizards.)

@ John Wendel:

Unfortunately, this is a really, really difficult thing to do. I think Siri is a very good example of what the stat of the art looks like right now in that department. It is good, but we still have a lot of trouble parsing common speech. You still have to phrase your sentences certain way, and avoid ambiguity when talking to those machines. And if you have a speech impediment, stutter or a thick foreign accent, you are out of luck.

I am certain that we will get there one day, but speech recognition is one of the slowest growing fields in our industry – it evolves, but very slowly and via almost imperceptible incremental improvement, while most other technology branches have very rapid cycles, and turn themselves upside down quite regularly.

I don’t want to interact with a device by gestures of any style, I just want to speak to it and have it do what I mean.

Well, I tried Word Lens and it’s a bit of a ripoff:

$10 for Spanish to English
$10 for English to Spanish

Kinda pricey for a novelty app. It did manage to reverse/scramble some words for me. Gotta wonder how good the translation really is. I just don’t feel like spending $10 on something I will probably only use once or twice in my life. :P