Coruscation

Nuance, meanwhile, has similarly ambitious plans for its health care business. In collaboration with I.B.M., the company is developing analytics to scour the medical notes that doctors dictate after they see patients. The idea is to search the text for common red flags -- like medicines that interact dangerously -- and automatically alert doctors, hopefully reducing problems and health care costs.

US Airways introduced Wally last summer, as part of a relocation of its offshore customer service call-in operations back to the United States. Nuance designed the system to anticipate callers' requests. Wally, for example, can automatically tell frequent-flier members their seat assignments or report whether they have received upgrades. It also converts people's speech to text, so that, should customers ask to speak a live operator, they don't have to repeat their original requests.

the lack of disclosure bothers Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As voice-enabled systems become more sophisticated, she says, they create the illusion that we are interacting with other people, rather than with machines. In the long term, she says, the systems' sleekness and ease of use could end up diminishing the value of slower, messier, real human connections. Reminding users that they are talking to a machine can make them more conscious of the superficiality of the exchange.

"We need to make a cultural decision," Professor Turkle says. "Either we want to alert people when they are talking to a machine, or we don't."

Soon, Mr. Sejnoha predicts, many other devices, not just televisions, will be taking voiced commands, and talking back. In Germany, people can already ask a Nuance-powered coffee maker -- marketed as "the first fully automatic machine that obeys" speech -- to make cappuccino. The machine, called the Jura Impressa Z7 One Touch Voice, speaks both English and German.

See also: Goldman, backing Nuance, smashed Dragon.