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Get used to shouting at your car ...

Honda cars are going to be "at least as good as your PC at understanding what you say" - because Honda has bought IBM's voice-recognition technology, Via Voice. And yes, the car is supposed to understand you but no, it won't steer left or right. At least, not yet ...

In fact, the new system - if it works well - may even avoid accidents, because it won't be necessary to take your eyes off the road to program the navigation system. That is, if it works as advertised ...

Instead of using your fingers to press buttons, the voice recognition software will be what you use to operate the navigation system.

In that system, will be an embedded database of useful locations. "Touch by Voice" will enable you to press a "talk" button on the steering wheel, and then get directions. At least, if you speak American, you can. "The system can recognise commands such as 'find nearest gas station,' or 'find nearest ATM' or 'find the nearest Italian restaurant'," said the IBM announcement.

It also works in the normal car-nav way, of providing driving directions to and from any specified address or location. But quite how you get that location into its little mind, isn't going to be clear until we can test it.

The press release suggests that "the new system has a vocabulary of approximately 150 English-language commands and can recognise a range of accents." IBM Embedded ViaVoice is a package which has been sold to builders of smart phones, handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs), and car components. Even so, it's hard to imagine that those 150 words, however expertly chosen, wil include phrases like "the Hanger Lane Gyratory" or "Aunty Maud's house" or "Fourteen Acacia Grove." You'll have to program those in some other way, we suspect.

However, as any user of computer-based recognition can vouch, voice-trained machines work rather like particularly stupid waiters; they can be guaranteed to get it wrong when it matters. The new Honda Accord had better be well sound-proofed - not just to avoid intrusion of ambient noise from engine, traffic and wheels, but also to protect those outside the car from cries of abuse when the car drives them to the "town whore" instead of the "town hall" ... or vice versa.

The voice-enhanced car will appear in "next year's models" - which means the new Accords are due to begin reaching Honda dealerships Sept. 9.

As has become the convention, a helpful tame analyst has been trotted out with the announcement; this time it's Joanne Downie, Director of Strategy Analytics In-vehicle Telematics and Multimedia Service. She says: "With Telematics, the car becomes part of the seamless user environment. We estimate that this sector generated US$7.2billion in telematics service and equipment revenues in the US, W. Europe and Japan in 2001, and by 2007 is expected to reach over US$23billion for Terminals shipments and services combined."

IBM calls this pervasive computing. We look forward enormously to seeing it in action ... !