Why a bit of fast talking could save the PC from disaster

Grim news last week for PC makers, yet again, as they've been warned to fix their business model or just quit instead.

It's not a huge surprise: first smartphones and then tablets have done away with the need for a PC to carry out many -- perhaps even most -- basic computing tasks such as email or web browsing.

And PC makers were far, far too slow to respond to the threat to their market, only recently finally coming up with the two-in-one devices and hybrid tablet-PC products which have created a certain amount of interest among consumers and businesses.

Now, as the chart below shows, there's still a lot of PCs out there - and there will continue to be, too. But rather than being something that might get upgraded every three years, PC replacement cycles are slowing as many applications now run in the cloud, which makes local processing power less relevant to hardware owners. And it's likely PCs are being used less too, even if there is more than a billion of them out there.

That doesn't mean it's the end for the PC, however: gamers will keep buying and building super-powerful PCs for one, and business will be another big hold out.

But the direction of the trend is pretty clear: the PC is no longer the centre of our computing experience, but one device among many, and PC makers and users need to adjust to that.

It's not just about new devices being used instead of, and as well as, PCs, but also that these other devices have very different user interfaces: input has moved from the keyboard and mouse of the PC, to touch for smartphone and tablets and now, perhaps, it looks like the next big thing could be voice.

Work on getting computers to understand human conversation -- and to be able to talk themselves -- goes back decades, as our in-depth history of the development of speech technologies published this week shows. It looks like we are reaching an inflexion point: speech is now becoming a mainstream method of communicating with our devices.