Everyone likes to speculate, and recently there has been a lot of talk about reading machines and hearing machines. We know it is possible to simulate speech. This raises lots of interesting questions such as: If the machines can speak, will they squawk when you ask them to divide by zero? And can two machines carry on an intelligent conversation, say in Gaelic? And, of course, there is the expression "electronic brain" and the question, Do machines think? These questions are more philosophical than technical and I am going to duck them.