Speaking words of wisdom Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor
of the World Wide Web. Last week in New York, Sir Timothy
Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, gave the keynote
address at SpeechTek 2004. Held annually for the past 10 years,
the SpeechTek conference is all about the intersection of human
speech and computer technology. Sir Timothy (he was knighted
last year for services to technology) is director of the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a group founded 10 years ago to
develop international standards for the web. He spoke about the
recent advances made in using speech on the internet. This has
nothing to do with the use of the internet for phone calls
(Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP), which uses the internet
for transmitting normal telephone calls. Rather, it is about the
integration of human speech into the very fabric of the
internet. At its inception, the internet was text-based. That
part of the net called the World Wide Web also makes extensive
use of graphics, which can be inc