Computer: tell me a story based on the current weather in Paris.

Sometimes, when watching a film set in the "future" it's hard to see the links from where we are now to that point - things always still seem to never be moving fast enough to reach that sort of imagined idea. This seems even less likely in the time frame people tend to adhere to.

Every so often, however, a few things surface in the relevant press that make you realise that we are heading the right way - probably more quickly than we realise. It's just that to the main populace the first known of it is when sales start to come into the equation and we'll hear of nothing but the new idea involved.

"Carpy, what sparked this little thought off ?", I hear you wonder.

Well, thanks for asking.

It's only a little acorn at the moment but it's easy to imagine the oak growing from it and the other mental seedlings it'll germinate in the minds of those bright souls that dictate, sorry aid, our day to day lives.

Of all things it's the craze for "desktop search engines", something that didn't really exist until a few months ago. The idea is to extend the internet style web search to include the documents on your own physical hard drive - your Word documents or IM transcripts etc.

That, in itself, is a clever idea - to be able to not only see if people out there know about a certain thing but also to remind yourself of where your previous files would point to that too. Simple but logical as an idea extension goes.

It's in a move from there that things get interesting.

A third-party developer is already creating a plug-in that, using speech-to-text technology, will allow the search agent to transcribe the content of audio and video files on your machine and make that searchable too, thus deepening the indexing capabilities of those files beyond the basic metadata attached to the multimedia file.

Just think of the far fetched ideas you've seen in films - the main actor wakes up and asks the house computer if there is anything interesting in the press about "Big Co Ltd" that day and it reels off snippets from papers, news broadcasts and the emails unopended from that morning on the persons own PC.

The point to this is that each strand from text indexing, speech recognition, artificial intelligence, the ability to understand speech in recorded form pulled direct from live sources and now the links between them are already falling into place.

Ok, I'll grant that something that you may see in Bladerunner or Minority Report isn't exactly going to appear in the chain store tomorrow but slowly, and quietly, it does seem to be on the way.

Personally, where my "future imagined in the past" interest lies is in the first real-world succesor to Willy Wonka.

Oh, and I won't need their flavour-changing chocolate to answer back either......