Overcoming language barriers can be a matter of life or death in Iraq. Soldiers, medical personnel, and Iraqi citizens struggle to convey crucial information on a daily basis. While human translators are used in many situations, there simply aren't enough who are willing to assist in every important conversation. Last month, Menlo Park-based SRI International announced that it had deployed 32 Windows XP laptops loaded with advanced translation software for military evaluation in Iraq. The software, called IraqComm, facilitates an English-Arabic conversation by recording a person's spoken words, translating them, and playing the translation in a matter of seconds.

Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don't. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more personal, or to make tools for travelers. In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts. In a second demonstration, Soong used his software to grant Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, the ability to speak Mandarin. Hear Rick Rashid's voice in his native language and then translated into several other languages: English: Listen to a clip of Rick Rashid talking normally.

But the rivals can agree on some things--like the importance of artificial intelligence to the future of technology. Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, and Eric Horvitz, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise of AI. Afterward, the pair talked with Technology Review's IT editor, Tom Simonite, about what AI can do today, and what they think it'll be capable of tomorrow. Artificial intelligence is a complex subject, and some answers have been edited for brevity. Technology Review: You both spoke on stage of how AI has been advanced in recent years through the use of machine-learning techniques that take in large volumes of data and figure out things like how to translate text or transcribe speech.

If Algirdas Budrys–who signed his work "Algis Budrys" and answered to "Ajay" among the regular Americans with whom he lived–maintained an apprehensive watchfulness toward much of the human race, it wasn't without justification. To start with, as the small son of Lithuania's consul general in Königsberg, East Prussia, he had seen Adolf Hitler pass in full Nazi pomp, while the citizens of the city where Immanuel Kant lay buried whipped themselves into such frenzies of admiration that they soiled themselves and defecated in public. More than seven decades later, dying in a Chicago suburb, Budrys still remembered what he had seen from the second-story window of his parents' apartment on that spring day in 1936. He told me, "After the Hitlerjugend walked through, Hitler came by in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up. I'm sure he had an iron bar up his sleeve, because he couldn't have kept his arm that particular way for so long otherwise."

The first 30 minutes after a battlefield injury are dire: that's when nearly 86 percent of battlefield deaths occur. Before attending to the wounded, frontline physicians have to quickly locate the casualty and extract him from the battlefield, often under heavy fire. This can take up costly minutes, as well as expose medics themselves as possible targets. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are developing technology to give battlefield medics a helping hand–literally. Howie Choset, an associate professor of robotics at CMU, has engineered a snakelike robotic arm equipped with various sensors that can monitor a soldier's condition.

Eric Dishman is making a cup of tea-and his kitchen knows it. At Intel's Proactive Health Research lab in Hillsboro, OR, tiny sensors monitor the researcher's every move. Radio frequency identification tags and magnetic sensors discreetly affixed to mugs, a tea jar, and a kettle, plus switches that tell when cabinet doors are open or closed, track each tea-making step. A nearby computer makes sense of these signals; if Dishman pauses for too long, video clips on a television prompt him with what to do next. It's all part of a growing effort at Intel and other labs around the country to develop ways to help the elderly, and others who need assistance with everyday activities.

Compared to many aeronautical curiosities that have taken wing at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at California's Edwards Air Force Base over the years, the latest military test stunts did not appear very remarkable. Last April, a low-slung aircraft, about the size of a sport utility vehicle but with batlike wings similar to those of the B-2 stealth bomber, took off, flew at 10,500 meters and then dropped a 110-kilogram inert precision bomb while zipping along at 700 kilometers per hour. Four months later, a pair of the aircraft took off and flew together. These were modest stunts, to be sure, except for this fact: the jets have no pilots. They are the future of warfare, the first working models of networked autonomous attack jets, and the U.S. Department of Defense would like to start building them by 2010.

On a crisp october day last year, Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute kicked off its 25th-anniversary celebration, as the world's robotics experts came to Pittsburgh to see C-3PO, Shakey the robot, Honda's Asimo, and Astro Boy inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame. The next day saw demonstrations of running, snaking, and bagpipe-playing bots. On the third day, it was Mitsuo Kawato's turn to speak. The lights went down, and the director of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, made his way to the stage to the beat of rock music. Despite such a welcome, Kawato is an outsider here, dismissive of the self-congratulation that creeps into conversations about modern robotics.

In the popular imagination, chess isn't like a spelling bee or Trivial Pursuit, a competition to see who can hold the most facts in memory and consult them quickly. In chess, as in the arts and sciences, there is plenty of room for beauty, subtlety, and deep originality. Chess requires brilliant thinking, supposedly the one feat that would be–forever–beyond the reach of any computer. But for a decade, human beings have had to live with the fact that one of our species' most celebrated intellectual summits–the title of world chess champion–has to be shared with a machine, Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match in 1997. What lessons could be gleaned from this shocking upset?

Say that to a human airline agent nicely, and he or she will quickly disentangle your words and find flights that meet your criteria. Say it to the airline's automated reservations line, however, and all you're likely to get is a cheery digital voice intoning, "Sorry, I didn't catch that." Even assuming the airline's computers overcame the garbled words, background noise, and Boston accent to render the request into accurate text, no language-processing system has the computational firepower to make sense of your price and routing constraints, ignore irrelevancies like the fact that Saturday is your sister's birthday, and understand that if the party starts at 3:00 p.m., you're not interested in flights that arrive in Milwaukee at 4:00. If computers could understand and respond to such routine natural-language requests, the results would be win-win: airlines wouldn't need to hire so many agents, and consumers wouldn't have to struggle with the confusion of touch-tone interfaces that leave them furiously tapping the "0" button, vainly trying to reach a live operator. Futurists have been envisioning such a world since at least 1968, when 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 became the archetypal voice-interactive computer.