Finding meaning behind the words
By Ryan Olson

If you need to call Sprint to pay your bill or ask a question about service plans, a computer on the other end of the phone greets you with the following message:
“You have reached PCS Customer Solutions. Briefly tell me how I can help you.”
“Bill payment,” you reply.
Silence.
“Got it. I’ll connect you to our payment system.”
Seems easy enough. If you say a word like “pizza,” however, the system responds with the following:
“Here are some popular choices. When you hear the one you want, just say it back to me.”

This simple dialogue paints a fairly accurate picture of modern speech recognition technology. The key problem lies in the fact that software cannot find outside meaning in spoken words. Right now it’s only useful in customer service applications where calls can be routed based on a computer’s ability to find key words in a person’s speech and match them to desired outcomes. But the ultimate goal of many researchers is a system that can actually converse with human beings.

As speakers, we know that there is far more to language than a strict literal translation. Try explaining the intricacies of meaning to a computer that can fundamentally only tell the difference between ones and zeros, black and white or yes and no. Throughout the course of our lives we continually learn and refine our methods of communication, but today’s computers can’t adapt and learn languages in the same way. Many scientists are therefore becoming linguists, asking fundamental questions about the meanings of words and how we can find and interpret those meanings – so they can tell a computer how to do it. In order for a computer to understand language, it must be able to understand meaning in context, depending on variations in the speed or tone of a speaker’s voice. Speech technology has come a long way, but many researchers believe the most dramatic breakthroughs are on the immediate horizon.

Imagine missing a meeting at work and you wanted to get the important details. Instead of listening to the entire meeting on a tape while fast forwarding or rewinding until the spot where an important conversation took place, you could use a computer with speech recognition software to find...