I saw an article yesterday in the news about a lady in Australia who used her smartphone (an iPhone using the speech recognition system called Siri).  Here's part of the BBC article:

A woman from Cairns, Australia, used Siri to call an ambulance for her one-year-old daughter when she stopped breathing.

Stacey Gleeson grabbed her iPhone and ran to the child's room to help her but dropped it as she turned on the light.

She shouted at the handset to activate Siri and told it to get the emergency services on speakerphone as she began CPR.

Ms Gleeson told the BBC she feels it may have saved her daughter's life.

I know many Highway members currently don't use smartphones, but speech recognition is increasingly available and more sophisticated on all devices, including laptop computers that the majority of our members use.

If you're using WIndows 10, Microsoft's Cortana is available (although not wonderful at present, it will improve).  If you have an iPad or iPhone, Siri is a brilliant speech recognition tool.  Google Now is a system that is also extremely accurate and is available on Android devices such as Samsung smartphones and tablets, but also can be used on a laptop or desktop computer with the browser Google Chrome and a microphone.

Speech recognition (and the 'understanding' of it by a device) is a radical shift in the way we use technology.  Please don't see these new developments as threats or complications but more as a way of making technology easier to use.  And for two-fingered typists like myself....