Is voice recognition getting trendy ?

Sometimes you're under the impression that the computer world wants to revive the myth of the computer you can speak to. (him ?? her?? it?? oh well, to each his own ;))
- Apple recently announced that Mac OS X 10.4 would feature a spoken interface (http://www.apple.com/)
- Opera Software, makers of the Opera web-browser, aquired a "Via Voice" license from IBM, to enable a future version of its software to respond to vocal commands.
- According to Mac Observer, Apple patented a new voice print password system in replacement of keyboard input passwords.
So the latest trend seems to be using the voice as a new mean of interaction with the computer. Indeed nowadays, processing power is less of an issue compared to the time of the first attempts to voice recognition.
However we believe that the next step is visual commands. A few products are already available for disabled persons. The idea is to use sensors that detect eye movements and translate this data into, say, mouse cursor movements.
When you think about it, it can get way less messy than a few people in the same room talking to their computers at the same time :)