Have trouble programming your video cassette recorder? Everyone else over the age of 12 or so does anyway, so Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, Osaka, Japan, has developed the world’s first recorder with both speech synthesis and speech recognition (it likes to call it voice-interactive, even though that gets us talking about voice recognition – and voice recognition is distinguishing whether ’tis thee or me talking, and has nothing to do with recognising what either of us is saying) – using its Continous Linear compression/expansion Matching alpha technology, which makes it possible for the VCR to recognise spoken commands from a speaker whose speech pattern hasn’t been pre-registered: the process of programming the thing starts with a synthesised instruction from the remote control; the user then resprocess continues through channel selection, day of the week, starting and ending times, with the results verified by the unit’s liquid crystal display readout; Matsushita says it’s not yet ready to market the thing, and hasn’t set a price.
