SAN FRANCISCO--Bill Gates has been saying for years that one day soon we will use handwriting, voice and touch to control our computers. He's still saying that. In an interview with CNET News.com, Gates talks about some of the ways that speech recognition has already made inroads and discusses some of the places it will eventually go.

You guys built a pretty significant voice recognition engine into Vista. It hardly gets talked about. Are you surprised that some of the things you did in Vista aren't getting more attention?

Gates: Well, when you sell a product to hundreds of millions of users, there are features that millions of users love that you can call an obscure feature because, percentage wise, it's not very many. You know, Butler Lampson, one of our great researchers who has done great work going all the way back to his days at Xerox, was just sending me mail about how fantastic the improvements in the speech stuff are in Vista and, you know, we're hard at work on the next version of Windows. We're going to take this speech stuff even further.