Intelligent speech and language systems are here. It’s taken years for disparate technologies—speech recognition, synthesis, biometrics, language understanding, artificial intelligence—to develop along their separate evolutionary paths. Now the basic technologies are at your disposal, and you are empowered to succeed. But it takes more than vision and a few software tools to exploit the new voice interface. In this media-rich multimodal presentation, Bruce Balentine explores design issues for present and future products. How will our lives be changed by speech and voice? What are the emerging paradigms for natural language understanding, super-natural language, and small-footprint micro-voice appliances? What can we expect in the next 5 years? And what should you consider doing about it?