Ray Kurzweil came to Microsoft yesterday to give a talk and to promote his new book. He is one of the original commercial speech guys, so several of the old-timers here know him personally and a lot of us went to see him, especially people from Microsoft Research. He thinks we are surprisingly close to the future. Here are his predictions for the future of only five years from now:

2010 computers disappear

• We'll use computer displays where Images are written directly to the retina
• Ubiquitous high bandwidth network connections
• Tiny electronics embedded in clothing etc
• Full-immersion Virtual Reality
• Augmented reality: "heads-up" displays enhance your view of reality
• Interaction with virtual personalities
• Effective language technologies (such as speech and useful MT)

That last one is similar to the prediction some of us have been making. One of our developers jokes "If we can't do speech at human level quality by 2011, we'll get fired. If we do, then we'll get fired." Unfortunately the web site they gave us for the copies of his slides isn't working, though apparently you can see a similar deck here.