If you think back to the sophistication required to complete many of the common computer requests in Star Trek, I think you'll realize that accurate recognition of human speech was pretty trivial in comparison. Usually there would be a request like, "Computer, analyze this phenomenon and then search your data banks for any previous occurrences. What is the most probable cause." Star Trek computers were apparently all sentient beings. They were just extremely modest sentient beings and didn't want to make a big deal about it. Ah, "data banks". As a phrase it seemed to make so much more sense back then. -irrational john