These machines have 22 keys and are capable of typing at the speed of speech, around 180 words per minute, or three words every second.

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Not surprisingly for a company that makes phones and tablets, the hearing aid wouldn't always have to do the heavy lifting, either: iOS devices could handle some of the on-the-fly conversion, and pre-recorded speech could receive advance treatment to speed up the process.

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Two is that, having understood the speech, you then have to get it up to speed.

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Rather than dwell on the old performance metric of speed, Otellini, in his first Intel Developer Forum speech as CEO, focused on power consumption and heat dissipation of semiconductors.

FORBES: Chief Executive Paul Otellini

But Obama is unmoved by any of this, and as his speech at the UN General Assembly made clear, he is moving full speed ahead in his plans to subordinate US foreign policy to the UN.

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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.

ECONOMIST: Better speech-recognition technology