The Design of User Interfaces for Digital Speech Recognition Software

puters using toggle switches, punched cards, and punched paper tape. In the 1970s, the common control mechanism was the keyboard on teletypes and on video terminals. In the 1980s, with the advent of graphical user interfaces, people found that a new mode of interaction with the computer was useful. The concept of a pointer—the mouse—evolved. Its popularity grew such that the mouse is now a standard component of every modern computer. In the 1990s, the time is right to add yet another mode of interaction with the computer. As compute power grows each year, the boundary of the man–machine interface can move from interaction that is native to the computer toward communication that is natural to humans, that is, speech recognition.