One Voice Technologies president and CEO Dean Weber slipped a nice little gem into the press release on voice control for MIDs.

“MIDs are expected to begin shipping this year in 2008 and ABI Research predicts that by 2012, 90 million MIDs will ship (see http://www.abiresearch.com/products/market_research/MID). Voice control will be the standard for these devices and One Voice is positioned as the premier provider of this technology.”

Unfortunately, the research that he mentions is not freely available, so I can't tell if it's 90 million will ship over the 5 years, or they're predicting 90 million will ship in 2012. Either way, that's a huge number of MIDs, particularly when you compare that number to the shipped Tablet PCs. Of course, analyst predictions back in 2004 also called for 5 million Tablet PCs to ship this year (in 2008), with a total of around 10-11 million sold in the 4 year period. That obviously hasn't happen.

Do you think that the world wants 90 million MIDs by 2012? What effect will that have on mobile computing in general? Although that is no where near the number of cell phones deployed throughout the world, that's still one MID for every 73 people in the world. That's a pretty aggressive growth rate. There must be a pretty strong pent-up demand to sell that many that quickly.