Walt Trybula, now a lithography research manager at International Sematech, earlier did research at General Electric. He took me by surprise recently when he said the chip industry would experience good times in late 2004 and 2005.

Trybula's theory is that affordable 64-bit processors and higher-density DRAMs will combine to support speech processing, grammar checking and machine translation. A combination of those tools will entice many IT managers to upgrade their computers. "Anything that is rule-based really benefits from larger memory addressing," said Trybula.

Gordon Bell-the former Digital Equipment Corp. computer architect who now works in research at Microsoft Corp. in San Francisco-said that once the PC industry breaks past the 4-Gbyte memory address limit on 32-bit processors, then applications will run out of RAM, greatly speeding the user experience. And with a gigabyte of memory costing about $150 now, it is not hard to imagine affordable systems with more than 4 Gbytes of RAM.

David Nahamoo, a speech recognition expert at IBM Research, said the ability to process four 16-bit words at once offers benefits to speech processing, but the gains are not as dramatic as they are for vision-oriented algorithms. The real benefit comes in moving past the 4-Gbyte memory address barrier.

"What's going to happen is that very large grammars will be developed, and the speech recognition engine will be able to access the entire grammar in memory. For speech applications it is a godsend," said Nahamoo.

IBM developed a grammar for voice access to telephone directories and, Nahamoo said, "for all the different combinations, the grammar goes much beyond 4 Gbytes in size."

Right now, a human being can transcribe a tape and make one-tenth the errors of computer-based transcription. But that gap is closing so quickly that IBM Research has a lofty goal: By the end of the decade it expects to build a speech recognition system that is "better than human recognition." Computers could be trained to understand a wider variety of accents than most humans can comprehend.

That will require breakthroughs by creative speech researchers, more powerful processors and development of much larger data sets stored in RAM.

Will the good times roll again? With wireless networks, digital television and speech recognition as drivers, a boom is perfectly possible.

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