Comment 408 for bug 1

On 22/07/07, Fonss <email address hidden> wrote:
> I get tired of reading soo many blogs, but I wish I could read all of
> this quickly. Can we put some effort in the text to speech engines?
> F-Microshift, eat my short Bill.

There is a point here.

I just thought about it today: Where does the computing world go? Not
just Ubuntu - the whole industry. Even Microsoft is in trouble here.

What more can we do with computers? What will computers do five years
from now that they can't do today?

Writing documents and university papers can't get much better than
MS-Office, OpenOffice, TeX and DocBook. Each of them caters rather
well to their respective markets (except some interoperability issues,
which are really rather minor if you put the bizness bullshit aside.)

Music, Movies, Animation? You can't improve this field much more in
the home market, and the high-end market of professional artists and
studios is rather narrow. (Although ideas expressed in Lawrence
Lessig's book "Free Culture" can make it wider ... you can read it on
the web for free - it's amazing.)

Business v1.0 software - databases, billing, CRM, ERP? It is a market
of reliability, not innovation.

Websites, communications and social networks? True innovation in that
area hit a glass wall long ago, if you ask me. Some websites make up
nicer AJAX tricks, but that's about it.

So i thought that the really innovative thing that can useful on a
major scale may lie in the field of Linguistics (disclaimer: I am
studying for a B.A. in Linguistics). Speech recognition,
text-to-speech and automated translation - all of them are related to
Linguistics; none of them can be done right without proper scientific
Linguistic preparation.

Microsoft puts "improved" speech recognition into every version of
MS-Office, but it is very far from doing it right. Xerox and IBM tried
something in their respective (and respected) research labs, but it
didn't see the light of day (at least yet). Google are rumored to be
doing something with statistics-based automated translation.

But no-one has anything finalized.

The first one who does it right will rule the market for years to
come. Of the current players, Google seems to have the best chances to
succeed, but it can also be a startup company created by an anonymous
undergraduate Liberal Arts student in India, Nigeria or Ukraine (or
Israel :) ). If Canonical wants to make it big AND on the way make the
world a better place in the spirit of Ubuntu, it should hire that
student.