PEOPLE who send cellphone text messages to Internet chat rooms will soon be able to rest their aching thumbs. Michael Kearns at the University of Pennsylvania has developed an intelligent system that lets them join in simply by speaking into their phones.
Chat rooms are online “virtual” environments with different rooms in which people can socialise, move around and even perform basic actions and gestures, such as laughing, hugging and nodding. This is all done by typing dialogue and commands into a keyboard.
But to enter this sort of world via a phone requires more than just a system that…
