An article at "Network World Fusion" notes:

  "Two leaders in speech recognition, IBM and Belgian
   speech technology giant Lernout & Hauspie, have
   each built speech-enabled prototypes of handheld
   devices that could be commercially available as early
   as next year.

  "Both recently showed off palm-size devices that
   perform speech-to-text transcriptions, have
   voice-controlled personal digital assistants, and can
   respond to questions with a computer-synthesized
   voice."

The full article is at:

   http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2000/0706pdavoice.html

--Glenn