Technology Spotlight

Researchers and technology companies alike want to move from today's speech recognition systems with their highly restricted vocabularies and unnatural pauses between words (think: directory assistance or booking a train ticket) to the Star Trek or 2001: A Space Odyssey (the HAL 2000) scenario where computers can engage in spontaneous conversation. But teaching computers to understand and respond to completely naturally spoken dialogue is, in the words of one expert, like teaching computers to breathe. It's a big challenge, but one many predict will be met this century.  Learn more about spoken language systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Additional Resources

• V. Zue and J. Glass,“Conversational Interfaces: Advances and Challenges.” Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue on Spoken Language Processing, Vol. 88, August 2000.
• J. Glass and S. Seneff,“Flexible and Personalizable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Systems,” presented at HLT-NAACL 2003 Workshop on Research Directions in Dialogue Processing, Edmonton, Canada, May 2003.
• V. Zue, et al.,“JUPITER: A Telephone-Based Conversational Interface for Weather Information,” IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Vol. 8 , No. 1, January 2000.
• A list of links provided by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence [AAAI] for students, teachers, journalists, and everyone who would like to learn about what artificial intelligence is, and what AI scientists do.
• Computer Speech Technologies 
• Natural Language Processing
• Natural Language Understanding
• Speech Recognition vs. Speech Understanding   From MIT Press, a comprehensive overview  describing the various components of computer speech understanding technologies.
  

Sponsored by:

National Endowment for the Humanities	William and Flora Hewlett Foundation	Ford Foundation	Rosalind P. Walter	Arthur Vining Davis Foundations	Carnegie Corporation of New York