For unconstrained, speaker-independant speech, I suspect the goal is a *long* time away (not sure I would say 23rd century, though).
OTOH, for speaker dependent, fixed vocabulary, I think you can get "decent" performance, today. Esp if you pay careful attention to the design of the vocabulary at each stage of a "user interaction".
I would *love* to see/hear how folks with any type of tremor deal with *pen* interfaces.
Yes, but, once learned, a user can know that "the big number" is the current temperature while the "little number" is the setpoint. They could be arranged visually above/below to indicate heating vs cooling, etc.
You have more ways of conveying information over the visual channel than, for example, aural.
Use different voices for temperature vs. setpoint? Or different pitches, etc.?
Exactly. You want to remember an *idea* not some arbitrary set of sounds (phonemes).
It depends on the relationship of the "ideas" (symbols in your terms) to each other. Remembering a 10 digit number is relatively easy. Remembering the names of ten "random" items is considerably harder: lion pencil blue eucalyptus overflow chromium bread irish cold buoy When multiple words are thrown together to convey a single "idea" (current temperature), the surplus of words cuts into the ability to remember the *next* "idea" (which is also wrapped in multiple words).
Yet "7316" might represent a considerably larger cognitive load (for you).
I meet a lot of new people each week/month. Many of these I may see only once -- then stumble across them, again, many months later! Invariably, they are amazed (that I can recall their name and some "specifics" about them) and embarassed (that they can't recall *my* name -- though they invariably recognize my visage).
The trick, of course, is to *force* an association between them, their name and some "other idea" that gives you (me) a variety of handles to retrieve the data/tuple.
[I had a relation who's address was "356 ". I associated the address with # days in a year -- only different! :> ]In a user interface (to some sort of "system"), you have to provide terse ways of conveying data in "harmonious" sets -- the equivalent of (programming) *idioms*.