Computers People Can Talk With
From: Philadelphia Inquirer 02/09/2004 - Page C1
By: Robert S. Boyd

Making computers capable of understanding natural language to the degree that
human beings can converse with them as if they too were flesh-and-blood is a
long-term goal of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Thus far, research
and commercial development of computer-language technologies has met with
mixed success, with the most progress being made in text-to-speech
conversion: AOL and Yahoo!, for instance, offer services in which a computer
reads email aloud over the phone, though ASR News reports that 20 commercial
text-to-speech products tested in 2003 averaged 66 percent accuracy. Despite
such drawbacks, the technology has considerable practical value for visually
impaired users. Voice-recognition programs are frequently used by telephone
companies, business customer-service desks, and airlines, although their best
performance stems from adhering to a restricted vocabulary; available
commercial voice-recognition products can take dictation and generate written
text, while accuracy rates average between 60 percent and 90 percent.
Voice-recognition systems have significant security implications, and the NSF
and the National Security Agency are funding an initiative to identify people
who speak foreign languages. Machine translation technology has also made
progress, although its commercial use is currently limited to niche areas
such as hotel reservations, appointment scheduling, and weather reports.
Getting computers to understand natural language may ultimately be an
unreachable goal, given the complexity and flexibility of the medium. James
Glass of MIT says such a breakthrough would 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."  

View the entire article at:
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living/health/7908331.htm