With the technology 13 years later, there has to be a way to create the computer/phone system that Micheal has, anyone know how? I would love to do it. If you are a technology geek and could give me some insight on how to do this, would love to hear from you, please email me at [email protected]
I'm not sure how to go about it but if I were to wager a guess, I'd say a computer program over the internet using voice recognition combined with a program that dials and makes phone calls over the net. Of course back then that was most likely just fantasy but it is a movie though. I think the reason they did all this was to show that Furlong's character was anti-social and his father was wealthy but left him alone all the time and he became so detached from society that he only had one friend, dreamed of the girl next door and just liked to stay in his room and had all the techy gadgets he wanted and so he had that system because it was a state of the art and he could afford it, which also brings in his fancy then "widescreen" tv and sound system too.
I reckon he was a tech nerd. Just while I'm typing this though I find it important to note that I feel Furlong's performance in this film was excellent and he was still so young when he did this film. Furlong is going to hopefully have a long and great career because he certainly has the talent as far as I'm concerned.
Back when I originally watched this movie for the first time (around 2000), I was intrigued by the idea of a speech activated computer system.
At the time I was running windows, and I had limited success in the speech activated area. There are several programs out there which can perform these functions.
Dragon Naturally Speaking voice command & dictation software. Microsoft Office has voice activated dictation capabilities. Microsoft Agent(s) (Like the Paper-Clip and Merlin Wizard) can be be programmed to accept voice commands and perform scripted actions such as launching programs and responding with pre-scripted text-to-speech responses, etc.
While experimenting with the Microsoft agents, I wrote a basic script that would on demand launch a web browser session, call pre-programmed phone numbers using a dail-up modem, and perform simple Next, Previous, Stop, and Play, and Eject functions on the cd drive.
I eventually abandoned the idea because the technology at the time was too erratic, and was prone to false-recognitions, especially if you were playing music, or watching television, or worse yet, talking to someone.
But now that it's 2009, I actually have a cell phone (LG FUSIC) which has extremely accurate voice-activated capabilities, and it talks back to you, reading aloud text messages, announcing callers, and prompting you for further information when it needs it. It actually surpasses IGORs abilities and it's a hand held device. (I'm sad to say that the LG FUSIC has been discontinued) however many of the new LG phones actually have similar abilities.
It's funny that a cell phone has voice dialing, and yet there still isn't a program out there for PC that will do this for you.
Too bad Dragon NS doesn't have a plug-in to interact with skype. That would be awesome. If I knew how to write scripts for Dragon I might consider taking the time to program something for skype.
Voice recognition has come a long way though. I first started using it back in '96 (ViaVoice), but I had to read for 45mins just to get decent recognition. Dragon 10, only takes a few minutes to set up, and works flawlessly!