It's Time for a Conversation with your Computer

It took almost thirty years to get decent speech recognition programs on our computers. But if they're good enough to translate our words into characters, they can't engage in a conversation with us (I must say that some humans can't do either). But according to this article from Technology Research News, things are changing. Computer scientists from Scotland and California have designed a multithreaded system which can anticipate what you're going to say and are also able to switch context when you jump from a topic to another. This approach, which could be used in a wide range of applications, is welcome. Unfortunately, these researchers have selected the name "Conversational Interface Architecture" for their system, which leads to the worrisome acronym CIA. Anyway, the first commercial applications should be available within two years. Read more...

Here is a general description of this dialogue management system.

Researchers from Edinburgh University in Scotland and Stanford University have built a dialogue management system that promises to improve verbal communication with computers by giving the machine a sense of the type of phrase a person is likely to say next.

The Conversational Interface Architecture goes beyond the slot-filling dialogue systems commonly used for airline ticket booking systems by tracking multiple conversation threads, said Oliver Lemon, a senior research fellow at Edinburgh University. Slot-filling dialogue systems prompt users to provide topic-specific information and listen for keywords that determine the system's response to the user. (Via Roland Piquepaille)