SANTA ANA — The refrigerator will know when to order fresh milk for you online. The remote control will coordinate your music and video for every room. The vacuum cleaner will take verbal commands.

Those are the gee-whiz predictions that journalists can describe breathlessly after high-tech conferences. I could have written that sort of column after attending this summer's Southern California Summit on Semiconductors and Communications.

Instead, I have much gloomier predictions for the next five to 10 years. They're my own, but they're mostly based on what high-tech experts said at the conference and elsewhere.

Here are my four forecasts, which I hope are wrong:

- Electronics in the living room will remain an uncoordinated mess.

At present, with few exceptions, the family TV doesn't connect to a computer or a stereo or the Internet. The DVR won't talk to your computer's hard drive.

Tech companies have little incentive to solve that problem because they see the living room as turf to conquer. If they can make money on their own gadgets, why coordinate with others?

n Cell-phone reception will still be crummy.

Gilbert Amelio, chief executive of Jazz Semiconductor in Newport Beach, thinks I'm wrong on this one.

As semiconductor chips become ever smaller and cheaper, he said, mobile phone companies can eliminate dead zones by installing hundreds of tiny, unobtrusive supplementary transmitters.

Samueli predicted that, over the next 10 years, the transmission speed of wireless devices will nearly catch up to hard-wired computers.

I'd go along with them if I weren't so impressed with cell-phone companies' knack for cutting corners.

That tendency has made cell phones the most popular poor-performing product in the world.

- The United States still won't have a rational immigration policy, but that will matter less at the top of the high-tech world.

Increasingly, tech companies are multinational companies. Sure, they might want their top talent to work side by side, but that's not always possible or economical. So they've learned to use electronic communications to cope with tighter restrictions on immigration by high-tech professionals.

- Voice-activated devices still won't understand what I'm saying.

Ender Ayanoglu, director of the University of California-Irvine Center for Pervasive Communications, foresees vast improvements in speech-recognition and handwriting-recognition systems over the next 10 years.

But I still haven't recovered from unpleasant run-ins with my car's supposedly voice-activated GPS and climate-control systems.

So I switch to manual controls and pessimistically drive into the future.