Hi Hal, what's for Dinner?  Has Mary had her baby?

Home computer systems are progressively integrating all electronic entertainment, communications and household management functions. Within the next decade this will begin to encompass household energy management, including lighting, heating, cooling and some appliances. In some households this may extend to water consumption, grey water management and possibly to local electricity generation. 

As well as managing entertainment (TV, radio, telephony, wake up alarms and so on), it is expected that integrated home computing environments will mediate interactions with the Internet and its on-line commerce and information repositories to maintain household accounts as well optimising water and energy efficiency. In addition to keeping the social calendars of the householders, it is expected to agree a weekly food menu and order food, groceries and other household needs accordingly.  The new markets thus opened up will include new production methods and specialist equipment for rapidly changing film and TV studios and the new electronic media outlets.

As electronic systems have become faster and able to store ever more data, software has developed to exploit these new capabilities and speed.  In order to deliver IP based video computer CPUs need to be thousands of times faster than those available just a few years ago. Storage for movies is now measured in terabytes (million, million bytes). This vast increase in capability is only beginning to be utilised by new software. Whereas in the early days computers followed a strict linear instruction set, to day this is replaced by the interaction of functional objects, such that the programmer is often unaware of the actual events that will occur in every circumstance. Many programs 'learn on the job' and change their parameters accordingly.  For example the object interactions in many computer games are entirely circumstantial; different for every player and every time they are played. Thus computers are becoming more and more 'human like' in their interactions with the players.

Text to speech facilities have been available on a standard PC for over ten years and recent versions of operating systems software have included progressively improving speech to text (dictation) software built in. This software is taught by the user to recognise their speech patterns grammar and vocabulary. It is expected that within the next decade many people will simply talk to their home computer or entertainment system as if it is another person (like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey).  Several GPS navigation devices already incorporate voice recognition to receive destination instructions.  New markets will include new domestic appliances, sport and recreation options and possibly aids for an aging population.

Social networking and online commerce are already ubiquitous.  Social networking and many forms of online commerce and are supported by large, commercially owned, data storage and processing farms connected to the Internet.  These ever expanding server farm environments allow users from all connected locations worldwide to use the Internet to connect to services that meet a wide variety of needs from sharing the trivia of one's life with friends or strangers, to composing a letter or keeping the household accounts.  This vast range of options and possibilities is continually expanding as new products are imagined and offered to a novelty hungry public.  At the present time they are largely, and very profitably, funded by businesses wishing to advertise their products or services.