Gates talks speech, spam

SAN DIEGO — If Bill Gates gets his way, within 10 years speech technology will be ubiquitous and the unrelenting security headaches of today will be only a distant nightmare. Interviewed by Gartner CEO Michael Fleisher on stage here at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2004, Gates also touched on the importance of security, Web services, and visual modeling technologies.

In response to the question of which IT innovations will gain prominence within 10 years, the chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft first pointed to speech technology. As technical hurdles such as background noise and context are overcome, major adoption will arrive, Gates said.

“Within 10 years speech will be in every device,” Gates said. “Things like speech and [electronic] ink are so natural, when they get the right quality level they will be in everything.”

Soon, dictating to PCs and giving commands to cell phones will be basic modes of interacting with technology, he said.

“The keyboard won’t go away. Your interaction will be multimodal; talking and typing and using [electronic] ink,” Gates said.

As Microsoft has reiterated at every turn, security is also a primary area of investment within the software company.

Spam, for instance, is a particular area of focus. The most dangerous aspect of spam is social engineering attacks that spoof sender identities, Gates said.

The key to solving the spam problem is to verify sender identities, a capability that was not built into the messaging protocol SMTP, Gates said.

“It turns out this verify sender element — the caller ID in e-mail — is key to solving spam and making sure people don’t do these social engineering spoofs. Every [message] coming in needs to be verified,” he said.

Today, security is the top priority of development at Microsoft, according to Gates. “Within the next two years it will be off the Top Five list,” Gates said. Isolating virus outbreaks and improving firewall administration are necessary steps toward that goal, he said.

The development of visual modeling tools across systems and code also is another strong focus, Gates said.

Visual modeling for business processes will automatically show business information such as sales and forecast data in rich, visual ways. The goal is to express without code exactly what steps are necessary in a workflow.

“It will be a will be visual model automatically, not writing code for each instance,” Gates said. “The key breakthrough in coding is to write less code. There is nothing magical that will make a million lines of code a pretty thing. In a decade we should be able to reduce the code [developers] write by at least a factor of five.”

Although is buzz factor has worn down, Gates said Web services are still flourishing and will usher in radical improvements in software connectivity.

“There has never before been a protocol that lets software connect to another piece of software and have rally complete flows of information back and forth,” Gates said. “Web services give the ability for any [piece of] software in any language on any system, find and connect securely with another piece of software. [Web services] will be built into the server OS, client OS, and administration [tools],” Gates said.

Once Web services standards are pervasive, application and software connectivity will gain newfound depth and sophistication, according to Gates