In 2002, the CAS issued its new technology -- a voice recognition technology, which breaks the history of foreign companies monopolizing Chinese speech recognition products since 1998. Thus it has an important strategic sense in science and technology.

The applications of this technology are broad. It may be applied in the networking handset. For instance, when the user says "the Beijing weather," the handset screen can give the weather forecast. Also, people may be able to, while at the office, call home (when nobody is home) and "order" the water heater to prepare hot water before anybody arrive home.

As early as in 1968, the first robot that could understand the human language appeared in a science fiction movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hereafter, many countries dived into this new domain. As some miniature machines, like handsets, handheld PCs, and so on are smaller, it is hard to input complex instructions in them; voice recognition technology can solve this problem.

Some expert forecast that in the next 5 years, Chinese voice recognition will occupy a market worth some 130 billion Yuan (US$15.7 billion).