Seems like all of the big companies are focusing on voice. There’s the iPod shuffle of course, the iLane that reads email etc. It’s like they all started watching Knight Rider and fell in love with the idea of gadgets talking as well as users talking to their gadgets. In the end we may all want our gadgets and ourselves to STFU, but for now there’s a lot of jibber-jabber going on.

Add Asus to the list of those who want voice recognition devices. They want “an end to the keyboard.” And so a bunch of Eee products will soon be introduced with voice recognition capabilities later this year.

“Oh for sure,” reiterated Asus CEO Jerry Shen, when TechRadar quizzed him further about voice-controlled computing.

“Actually, internally we have one team dedicated to studying voice recognition. Touch and gesture input is universal, whereas language is not universal.

“The first Eee PC or Eee Top products implementing voice-recognition and features will be ready by Q3/Q4 2009 – with our dedicated development team working with third parties in both Japan and the US and reporting directly to me. So this is something we will see very soon, later this year.”

That’s all fine, but when in a public place, do you really want to be talking to your computer? I think not.

[Techradar]