"None of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

As far as I know, you could get very close to this today. And with improvements to speech recognition algorythms, you could get even closer. However, the computer, printer, and software were so well integrated in this future time that it was a completely consumer-oriented product, unlike today's computer systems. Designers take note!

The first science fiction writer to come up with the idea of a machine that could transcribe human speech appears to have been David H. Keller, writing in 1934; he called it a vibrowriter. The first efforts at attempting machine translation of speech came in the late 1940's as the US government was trying to transcribe and translate Russian documents. (The agency responsible for the research later came to be known as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency - DARPA - which also presided over the invention of TCP/IP, which brought us the Internet.)

Bell Labs was successful in creating a machine system in 1952 that could distinguish the spoken numerals 0-9. By 1960, a system that distinguished 50 words was available.

However, as anyone who has used any of the current commercially available systems knows, speech recognition is still a work in progress.

And when was the first commercially successful device using speech recognition sold? In 1922 a toy called "Radio Rex" was sold; it consisted of a celluloid dog with an iron base. The dog sat in his doghouse held by an electromagnet which pressed against a spring. The current which energized the magnet flowed through a metal bar that formed a bridge with two supporting members. When this bridge was exposed to acoustic energy at 500 hertz, the current was interrupted and the dog sprang from his house. The vowel in Rex when spoken by most people creates a tone around 500 hertz.