Word: dragon
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With good or bad luck, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would have provided a stern challenge. Consider these factors: a $15 million action movie that was also to be a poignant, tragic romance; a fight choreographer, Yuen Wo-ping, who had won international acclaim for his work on The Matrix and was bound to tangle with the soft-spoken, hard-to-budge Lee; a top-flight all-Asian cast featuring Chow Yun Fat (Hong Kong), Michelle Yeoh (Malaysia), Zhang Ziyi (Beijing) and Chang Chen (Taiwan). Only one of the stars--Zhang, then a 19-year-old ingenue--spoke anything like...
Talking to a computer is always easier than typing, which is why engineers have been working with such fervor on voice-recognition technology. They've made great progress. The accuracy rates of dictation programs from industry leaders--Lernout & Hauspie, Dragon Systems, Microsoft and IBM--have been improving around 10% a year for a decade now. During the next year, voice software geared to their specialized vocabularies is expected to gain a foothold in the medical and legal professions. Popular search sites like AskJeeves and TellMe Network hope to become "voice portals," letting users seek information by speaking simple phrases into...
...your pocket, anytime, anywhere," says Kai-Fu Lee, Microsoft's v.p. of user-interface platforms, of tomorrow's wireless and handheld devices. Most of them will be too small to have a keyboard. "The only way you're ever going to get lots of data into small devices," says Dragon Systems founder Janet Baker, "is by talking to them...
Audiences watching the aerial ballets, lightning swordplay and Astaire-worthy foot fights in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may gasp with childlike wonder and delight. Who is brilliant and daft enough to choreograph these nonstop battles? The answer is Yuen Wo-ping, stunt master supreme and, not incidentally, the director of a couple of dozen films--among them some of the most exciting in Hong Kong movie history. "He's directed more movies than I have," says Ang Lee. "And better ones...
...certainly owes much to his action choreographer, as both a colleague and an inspiration. Some of Crouching Tiger's most sensational exploits echo earlier Yuen films. The spectacle of a lady thief flying over rooftops is a highlight of Yuen's 1994 Fire Dragon. And the up-a-tree skirmish? Catch the warriors perched on flaming poles in 1993's Iron Monkey...