Within five years, your relationship to your computer and all your household appliances will resemble life aboard the USS Enterprise, the fictional starship that carried Captain Kirk and his "Star Trek" crew "where no one has gone before." Speech enabled software developed by pioneers like those at Linguistic Agents-a Jerusalem-based company-promises to transform your life. You won't be able to beam yourself out of embarrassing or dangerous situations, but you will be able to have a conversation like this with your computer:

"Wake me up at 6:30 a.m. with music from my iPod library."

"You want me to wake you up at 6:30 a.m. with music from your iPod library. Is that correct?"

"Yes, and find last week's Hebrew school assignment on Ben-Gurion, and print a copy for me."

"There are two Ben-Gurion files. Which would you like printed?"

"Please print the biography, and then turn off the lights. Good night."

(Lights turn off immediately) "Good night. Don't forget to recite the Shema!"

Several technological advances must precede this futuristic vision, and Linguistic Agents has boldly moved into that exciting frontier. After seven years of research, the company released software-called Advanced Language Machine (ALM)-that enables computers to understand ideas underlying written text. For example, when you Google information online, the search engine doesn't understand the words you type, it simply looks for them online. If you type, "I'm looking for a movie theater," Google will return a list of sites where the words "looking" and "movie theater" appear close together. The ALM yellow pages directory, on the other hand, will immediately prompt the computer to ask, "Where?"

"The idea was to create software that allows the computer to understand and interact with human beings on a more natural language level," says Sruly Taber, Linguistic Agents' chief information officer. "Instead of us having to learn to speak the computer's language, the computers have to learn to speak our language."

ALM is the brainchild of Sasson Margaliot, founder of Linguistic Agents. "To finally have a working product is a dream come true," he says. But the dream isn't finished; Margaliot hopes to launch a speech recognition version of ALM next year. That advancement not only will provide a technological foundation for controlling household appliances, but also will enhance gaming systems like PlayStation and Xbox. Now, the only way to move video game characters is to push controller buttons. But the speech recognition version of ALM will change that. With the new software, shouting "Jump!" will make Mario jump on the screen. "People are already yelling at their games anyway," Taber says. "We'd just add the functionality of making it work."

Taber's confidence appears justified. "Antivirus and instant messaging technology originated in Israel," he explains proudly. Although "the brain power in Jerusalem is amazing," Taber wonders if it's more than mere coincidence that Jerusalem has become a hub of technological innovation. After all, he says, this city "has already given the world an eternal knowledge that revolutionized human life." It looks like Jerusalem is poised to do so again.