The voice recognition revolution is almost here

There is an ardent group who believe that the written word -- handwritten, texted, printed, keyboarded -- is on its way out. For years, voice recognition was mainly a novelty for nerds or a pain-in-the-neck substitute for people unable to type. That's changed, and fast -- even in the three short years since Apple unleashed Siri onto a gazillion iPhones. Dictation software is more accurate, yes, but it's more than that. Advances in natural language processing, which can understand the meaning of the words and recognize habits of speech, have given rise to brave new possibilities for the spoken word-- like the Internet of Things and identification by speech recognition.