So far Dr Kristensson and Dr Vertanen have carried out only limited trials on a handful of people.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

What is frustrating about this, says Dr Kristensson, is that more often than not the correct strings of words were recognised, but rejected by the speech-recognition program on statistical grounds.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

The prototype uses an open-source speech-recognition program called Pocket Sphinx, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, but Dr Kristensson reckons it would be easy to apply the same approach to commercially available programs like Nuance's Dragon.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

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.

ECONOMIST: Better speech-recognition technology