<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
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Monday, February 16, 2004  

Lofty Goal - Computers People Can Talk With. Day Is Nearer When Devices Understand
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living/health/7908331.htm

Lofty goal - Computers people can talk with. Day is nearer when devices understand. By Robert S. Boyd. Philadelphia Inquirer. "Reading aloud is the simplest challenge in the 40-year struggle to teach human language to computers. Other computer-language skills are more complicated. They include taking dictation, responding to questions or commands, identifying a speaker, translating languages, and carrying on a modestly intelligent conversation on a limited subject, such as what's at the movies. The greatest challenge is to get a computer to 'understand' natural language and respond appropriately. The National Science Foundation is soliciting proposals for new research to enable people to 'address a computer at any time and any place at least as effectively as if they were addressing another person.' The goal is to make computers 'behave more like humans, so that humans don't have to adapt to a machine using a mouse and a keyboard, but instead the machine adapts to the human,' said James Glass at the Laboratory for Spoken Language Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ... Getting a computer to understand is harder than getting one to talk. Nevertheless, voice-recognition programs are in common use today by telephone companies, airlines, and business customer-service desks."

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:52 AM
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