These are some ideas I have about the future of computing.

2010 First nano computers

Computers that are buildt at the nano level, using molecules to processing computuations. Not very useful until you need to conserve space like crazy, then these systems could become very useful, such as on aircraft or spacecraft.

2015 Computers that routinely recognize speech with accuracy better then humans.
Operating Systems that interface with people rather then people interfacing with operating systemts.

We have yet to achieve a mass market computer that can not only hear correctly and take the meaning of english speech, with a margin of error so small as to make it irrelevant. This is closer then we think because the major groundwork for speech recognition has already been tackled and mankind should be in the last generation of dictation taken by hand. Typing is a skill that will become outmoded not by computers that can hear speech and translate the sound vibrations into letters and thus words on the screen, but by computers that can do that while simulatenously take the meaning of those works, incomplete sentences, and either form an audible response or visual response and process the task. For example, today if you want to write out a letter using a computer, you turn your computer on, load into your profile in windows, open find the microsoft word icon, open the program, start typing, and then use spell check, and then print it out, then save it, having to choose where it gets put, and close the file. You use the mouse, and the keyboard and have to be able to see to make it all work. For the blind this doesnt work well, for those who can't move their hands this doesnt work at all. For the rest of us it is time consuming.

Imagine a computer that you just talk to, "Computer, I want to write a letter and print it out on paper." The computer comes alive from the wake state, opens the word processor, with a blank page, this happens rapidly because computers are so much faster, while it is happening you can be talking as if you hadn't stopped, dictating the entire letter. You speak to the computer not into a microphone but just into the room and the computer itself adjusts the volume of the microphone so as to get the optimum signal to noise ratio, the computer also uses a filter to screen out other noises, music with pitches that are higher or lower the your own human speech so as to not cause a disruption in it's coherence. At the end of each sentence the computer would evaluate if the sentence makes sense, at the end of each paragraph, again re-evaluating the sensical structure of the components of the speech. This evaluation and all of the evaluations, the histroy, would travel with you to any computer you use throughout your life so that it could speed the processing time by looking for the patterns in the way you speak.

Of course there will be an occasssional miscommunication just as if speaking between two people occurs, people have the ability to read tone, inflection, body language, whereas a computer is limited to just the sound of the vibrations of the words and their meaning when combined with the other words in the sentence and paragraph, even the article as whole.

Then editing would progress, and this is where the human's subjective abilities picking from what you like and don't like in the form of word replacements, or revising of sentences to make them make sense, or if its a casual letter, just leaving it as is with jargon, and slang, and the contexts that make communication personalized. Then you'd just tell the computer to print the document and save it. The computer would read the document, storing keywords, themes, colors, things that people remember about thier written words so that in the future you could ask the computer to find the document.

The way we do this now by searching, or trying to keep everything neat and tidy isn't very efficient because ultimately humans aren't tidy, or terribly organized, organization is a skill, a task that computers are much better suited to complete on the whole anyway.

The advantages of having a computer that could understand speech and interpret it would be huge. Not only that but your speech patterns as well as other peoples speech patters when matched up chronologically and mated with age could give insight to computers with other people who have, speech impediments or learning disabilities, tools that would be easier for computers to make a good guess at what someone is saying over what a single person could guess without all the knowledge and expriences a computer could apply to the sound made.

I'm coming back to this one, just not today.