Eyeing the millions to be made in a largely untapped market, Intel launched its first home networking product, reports Wired World.

Intel executives unveiled the AnyPoint networking system, which, true to the company's "no new wires" mantra, makes use of existing home phone lines.

At a cost of about US$99 per PC, users plug one end of the black AnyPoint box into the PC's printer port and the other end into any standard phone jack. Intel is taking orders for AnyPoint from its Web site. The system does not require additional wiring, executives said, only that users name each machine and designate the PC that will act as the gateway to the Internet. AnyPoint can then detect when new PCs, printers, or modems are added to the network, and it automatically configures them.

In addition, the AnyPoint system will pass data between computers at a rate of up to 1 Mbps. Intel said that this will allow three or four people to surf the Internet simultaneously, even if they aredownloading large files.

As well as sharing an Internet connection, family members will also be able to share files, get common access to peripherals such as printers, and play multiplayer games over the network.

Intel execs expect the desire for shared Internet access to be the prime mover for the home networking market. Instead of taking turns to access the Net, family members can happily surf simultaneously without significant performance hits. Intel said that the performance will approximate surfing with multiple windows open on the same machine.

Mark Christensen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Network Communication's Group, sketched a vision of one billion connected computers within a decade. The future of computing, he said, is connected.

"There's a fundamental change in the industry," Christensen said. "There are more and more computers in homes and they are going to he connected."

New voice recognition software

Talking to your PC or a bank machine could soon begood for more than stress relief thanks to advancements in speech recognition. While voice recognition systems have become more popular on PCs in the last few years, the programs remain processor hogs that require training to recognise individual voices. A British company, Domain Dynamics, claims to have developed a technology that eliminates these drawbacks.

Domain Dynamics wants to incorporate its speech recognition technology in smartcards, security systems, diagnostic instruments, toys, and low-power, low-cost speech response and biometric verification devices.

Martin George, marketing manager for Domain Dynamics, said that the company is currently developing a 32-bit smartcard chip that would be able to identify individual voice patterns and verify the owner based on this biometric information. The company's software could also be integrated into the spare memory of a mobile phone, George said, preventing unauthorized users from making calls. The company is also trying to get the technology embeddedin PC sound cards for speech recognition and security verification applications.

"You could have a PC connected to the Internet, where the person could be verified to trade in shares or banking. It has strong implications for security of electronic commerce," George said.

Domain Dynamics' core technology, called Time Encoded Signal Processing and Recognition (TESPAR), uses 29 unique symbols to represent speech sounds. Unlike conventional voice recognition systems, which use "Fourier transform" to determine how frequencies in a signal change over time, Domain Dynamics' system represents the shapes of sound waves in real time.

"The problem with looking at the frequency component is that when people speak more slowly or quickly, you need to do dynamic time alignment, which requires about 100 times more processing power than our system does," said George.