Finding meaning behind the words
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...Another key to the extraction of meaning from speech is successfully finding “phones,” the most elementary characteristics of speech, according to the University of Washington’s Signal, Speech and Language Interpretation Lab. Phones of the world’s languages can be described and uniquely identified by a compact set of approximately 30 features – the sound that we made for the letter “d”, for example, is a universal one that involves pressing the tongue against the palate. But merely add a single vowel and you have additional variability. Pronounce “di” and “du” and you can see the difference. By creating software that can identify speech by breaking it down into its smallest component parts, it will be much easier to write recognition software for specific languages, built from the ground up.

“Meaning is something that we as humans take for granted but is not easy to define, much less capture,” says Alex Acero, a senior researcher at Microsoft and manager of the company’s speech technology group. Before we will have robots that understand whom we’re talking about when we say “her” or be able to distinguish sarcasm, software will need to identify and understand many variables. Filtering out ambient noise, not having to define a word’s meaning every time it is used, or simply having a computer say “I don’t understand” when meaning is uncertain are just a few of the hurdles to overcome. r

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