Steve Jobs’s Predictions from the 1983 International Design Conference

Originally published at: Steve Jobs’s Predictions from the 1983 International Design Conference - TidBITS

As part of a new digital exhibit, the Steve Jobs Archive has released a video of Jobs addressing designers at an industry conference in Aspen. Although it’s interesting to look back at the time, it’s also fascinating to see how accurate his predictions were.

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Actually not that far off. In 1993, Apple’s PlainTalk software was available. It was for recognizing commands, not dictation, but it was available and (sort of) worked.

Also in 1993, IBM released the “IBM Personal Dictation System”, aka “VoiceType”. It was available for Windows, OS/2 and AIX (IBM’s Unix OS). In 1996, the OS/2 version was included for free with OS/2 version 4. As a user of OS/2, I found that it was too slow to be useful on the 486 PC I was using, but it worked acceptably well on Pentium systems (which was IBM’s published minimum hardware requirement for VoiceType). In 1997, IBM released VoiceType for Windows and Macs as IBM ViaVoice.

But Jobs may not have known about (or chose to ignore) the product that was already for sale at the time. In 1982, Dragon Systems was founded, selling voice recognition/dictation software for MS-DOS. DragonDictate was very popular and some authors (e.g. the Sci-Fi author Peter David) used it extensively when medical conditions made typing impossible.

DragonDictate was not continuous speech - you had to pause between words (much like you had to with the IBM products), but you would quickly get used to inserting these brief pauses. Sometimes to the confusion of other humans if you forgot to stop doing it when talking to them.

Dragon released Dragon NaturallySpeaking in 1997 (five years after Jobs’ 10-year window), which was (I think) the first dictation package that would recognize continuous speech (without pauses between words).

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Great piece, Adam. Thanks

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