Voice completion software? Beware of Skynet

Is Skynet nearly upon us?

A Japanese program has been created that finishes people's sentences, according to a report in New Scientist.

A team from the National Instititute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba developed it and they claim it's virgin territory. There have been plenty of speech recognition software programs in the past, and they've gotten a bad rep, though the technology has improved immensely in recent years.

This however, takes a step past simple speech recognition and finishes your sentences for you.

There are some actual practical applications, too, the report pointed out.

Say, for example, you're driving to meet someone at a restaurant you've never been to before. You want to plug it into your GPS device, but you only remember part of the name? Start talking and your GPS would be able to fill in the blanks, possibly even giving you a couple of options.

It can work backwards too. If you're using the voice-controlled jukeboxvmade to demo the idea and ask for a song by "someone, er, Jackson" it will offer up Michael, Janet, and even Joe.

Put this programming in a robot and it's only a matter of time before it becomes self-aware. Beware the T-1000.