The first generation "Foolish Computer," a computer capable of listening to and speaking Chinese developed by China Science and Technology University Xunfei Company, will soon be ready for the market.

The KD system, a Chinese language transition technology developed by the language communication laboratory at China Science and Technology University, makes it possible to speak with the computer.

Recently, when a reporter read an article for the computer, the characters appeared on the computer immediately. After the journalists revised some inaccurate words using a handwriting input board and printed out the article, the article was ready for publication.

A researcher said that someone who has never used a computer could learn to use this computer to watch VCDs, play video games, use a word processor, surf the Internet, etc. in half a day. For example, if someone wants to watch a movie, he or she would say, "watch VCD" in Chinese, put in the disk, say "play the disk" and the computer will start playing the movie. Or, if someone wants to edit an article, he or she would say "title" in Chinese, and the computer will select the title, if he said "boldface", the characters in the title will turn into boldface; after editing, all he needs to say is "print", the article will print out.