About 20 years ago, Nissan introduced the world's first "talking car". Actually, it was just a recorded voice and it wouldn't stop telling you to close the door until you really heard and did it.
Times have changed and the talking car of the near future is a car that you can talk to, rather than a car that talks to you. You'll be able to control your radio by giving voice orders. And you can get traffic reports or directions, and send or receive emails in the talking car. To do all these, you needn't push a button at all.
This is good news for those who spend more and more of their lives in their cars. In fact, the new type of cars will be more like offices on wheels because it has computers, wireless internet and satellite radio inside. Companies are hoping that time wasted in traffic could be put to better use. If workers are able to check their emails, faxes, and meeting time on the way to work, they can spend more time at the offices doing more important tasks.
Microsoft, of course, is hoping that every one of those mobile offices will use Windows."It's a great goal." says Dick Brass, VP of Microsoft's automotive division (汽车分部)." But we'd like to have one of our operating systems in every car on earth." There are already 650 million cars in the world, and every year about 50 million new cars roll off the production lines. If Brass' wish came true, cars could become a bigger business for Microsoft than computers.
