Does our economy depend on the next big thing? And, is it here?

  His point about the close interaction of technology and economic growth is supported by other economists. Adam Smith, in his incredible work, The Wealth of Nations, clearly indicated the importance of technology in his analysis of what made economies grow to provide a better quality of life to each individual. His "pin factory" example discussed in detail how breaking down work into parts (he described essentially an assembly line for pins) allowed items to be produced economically and at a price that the "invisible hand" would support.* Improvements in technology create demand by lowering prices for existing products and creating new "needs." (Could you do without email?)

  Paul Romer published Endogenous Technological Change in The Journal of Political Economy in 1990, arguing that one couldn't understand economic development and the difference in the Wealth of Nations between nations without specifically including technology development in economic models. Perhaps surprisingly, technology was considered an "exogenous" (external) factor too hard to handle in economic models at the time. Many economists still treat it as a factor beyond mathematical analysis. As another example, Eric Beinhocker, in his 2006 book The Origin of Wealth, speaks of a current "radical remaking of economics," specifically trying to understand the correlation between the "complexity" of an economy and its wealth and giving examples such as "the great technological leap of the Industrial Revolution."

  What does all this have to do with speech technology? Let's go back to Krugman's belief that there is not a technology innovation occurring that could fundamentally move the US into growth mode. As frequent readers of this column may have already ascertained, I disagree. The next major technology innovation has clearly begun--mobile phones (and other data-network-connected mobile devices). Mobile phone sales are certainly exhibiting growth that defies the recession, but the trend to wider use of the devices is not the full trend.

  The fundamental trend is the evolution of devices we can carry around with us that serve as an extension of ourselves. Certainly, early growth has been driven by the extension of our ability to communicate with others wherever we or they are--and the ability to communicate with others when they aren't available for an immediate response (e.g., through voice or text messages or email).

  This fundamental change in person-to-person communications has created the desire (and perhaps the need) to carry a mobile phone/device with us everywhere. It's natural to want to use that device to do other things not associated with person-to-person communications. Smartphone growth has in part been driven because they provide access to the resources of the Web. In the long run, this mobile extension of ourselves will aid us in most aspects of our life, in part extending our personal memory (e.g., of contact and appointment information), our knowledge (you may not remember a fact, but you can get to it quickly), our commerce (the hours of that store and available discount coupons, or just buy it from your mobile phone), our entertainment (personalized radio stations and book reviews), and our access to the opinions of others (e.g., blogs and consumer product evaluations).  I summarize this broad, eventually indispensible, functionality as a "personal assistant."

  As the things we do with our personal assistant continue to grow, the need for an effective user interface to allow us to deal with this complexity grows. The current Graphical User Interface model is up to the task of supporting such a broad functionality as a personal assistant on these small devices. Certainly, as one simple case, we may need to use them in a hands-free manner much of the time. In some developing companies, there is a substantial subset of mobile phone users that aren't literate.

  That's where speech technology is the final piece of our personal assistant revolution. I believe the ultimate model for our mobile personal assistant is "say or type what you want," rather than complex touch-menu or icon-based navigation.

  After all, that is how Web search evolved. One surfed from one Web site to another trying to find information until we got the Web search box--just type what you want and find it. On mobile phones, we already have the option of saying a search term rather than typing it. Some further innovations in the flexibility of the voice and text control option--what some would call "natural language processing"--will come along to make this even more usable than the speech and text processing tools available today.

  So will this innovation save the world economy? Is it the next "big thing" in technology that will drive economic growth? No one thought we couldn't do without electric lights or the Web before we had them. When your personal assistant makes life better for you and makes your money and time go further, will you give it up?

* Some readers might feel that technology is only physical innovations, such as the automobile, not process and social innovations, such as the assembly line or "the rule of law." Economists define technology more broadly. For example, Richard Nelson of Columbia University, includes both physical and social innovations in his definition. Paul Romer defined technology simply as "improvement in the instructions for mixing together raw materials." As a side note, the power of "breaking things down" (Smith's focus in the pin factory example) was discussed in a more modern context in an excellent book by a speech recognition veteran (Bell Labs, Dialogic/Intel), Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky, in a 2005 book, The Pebble and the Avalanche: How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions.