By 2020, technology will have made such rapid progress, that speech recognition by a computer will exceed that of a human.

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The project draws on expertise in speech recognition and in computer vision - ways of capturing visual data - which have been a strength of Cambridge and the Toshiba lab in particular.

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For example vehicles are rarely hooked up to the internet or to remote servers, and therefore the computer processor already installed by the car manufacturer handles speech recognition.

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Per Ola Kristensson and Keith Vertanen, at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, have developed a method of allowing speech-recognition programs to share their thoughts, as it were, with the user, in order to speed up the correction process.

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Already advanced speech recognition systems can be found in smartphones and most modern computer operating systems.

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This has mirrored progress in fields as diverse as speech recognition and credit-card fraud detection, where modern techniques combined with a continuing explosion in computer power have made possible behaviour that seems very like human intelligence, albeit limited to a specific domain.

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The computer of the future, one that sips power, boots up instantly and ably handles the most complex speech and image recognition, is under construction in a handful of laboratories.

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