A renewed international effort is gearing up to design computers and software that smash language barriers and create a borderless global marketplace. A woman sits at a desk in Manhattan, talking to herself in French. The phrases she balances on each breath are musical to American ears. She has postcards of Montreal tacked up on the walls of her cubicle – pastel-painted houses in the snow – so as she sculpts the contours of each syllable, she can remind herself of the place where the sounds she's making are heard every day in the street. Her name is Guylaine Laperrière, and she came to New York City more than a decade ago to study musical theater. One day, a friend asked her if she wanted to make a little cash dubbing a French voice-over for a promotional short about insurance. She took the job, and was surprised how much she enjoyed bringing ideas from one language home into another. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links.

With a souped-up reproducing piano and some ingenious learning machines, AI maestro Gerhard Widmer is discovering how performers unlock the art in Mozart. A gray-blue dusk is settling over the Gothic cathedrals, palatial opera houses, and labyrinthine streets of Vienna's First District. Here in the Austrian capital, music is an almost elemental force. It's a place where very old and very new musical traditions collide and intermingle – the perfect setting for a computer scientist obsessed with examining the blips and fault lines, deviations and inventions, that transform music into something more than code and just slightly less than magic. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. It's Friday evening, and most of his fellow teachers at the University of Vienna have already gone home, but associate professor Gerhard Widmer is bounding up the stairs of a peach-colored Baroque building and into the offices of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He waves hello to his team scientists – Simon Dixon, Emilios Cambouropoulos, and Werner Goebl – and makes for a computer monitor marked EUROPA, which is jacked into an electric piano. Widmer eagerly begins to trigger several audio files.

Compiled by Carl Zimmer (zimmer@panix.com) Natural Language Laboratory, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia Researchers are devising "relaxed grammars" to extract the sense of transcribed speech through a method known as "partial parsing," which deciphers chunks of language rather than breaking down the structure of entire sentences. Their work is being integrated into closed-captioning technology for real-time TV translations. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

As the US war machine develops a digital air force of "unmanned aerial vehicles," it's only a matter of time before fighter planes without fighter jocks joust in some robot dogfight in the sky. "Tumbleweeds cleared" reads the sign by the side of the road, a fair indication of the nature of local enterprise. This is the desert east of Palmdale, California, center of the US high-tech aerospace industry. To the north is Edwards Air Force Base and nearby, Air Force Plant 42, where Northrop hatched the B-2 bomber. A few hundred yards away is Lockheed Skunk Works, birthplace of the F-117 stealth fighter. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. But now I'm driving past old ranches with corrals jury-rigged from wire and discarded doors, beneath a sky as wide as the plain, looking for a very different kind of airplane.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. The outcome is a halt in federal funding for machine translation R&D. Darpa launches its Spoken Language Systems (SLS) program to develop apps for voice-activated human-machine interaction. Researchers focus on portable systems for face-to-face English-language business negotiations in German and Japanese.

Charles Platt reports on the latest battle to determine the most human computer, even as he worries that he may be the least human human. Robert Epstein is giving us all a pep talk. "You must work very hard to convince the judges that you're human," he tells us. "You shouldn't have any trouble doing that – because you are human." This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. He wears Dr. Martens boots, black jeans, a black shirt, a Mickey Mouse tie, and an earring. His longish hair is brushed straight back and flips up over his collar. Five of us are listening to him in a beige conference room on the brand-new campus of California State University at San Marcos, near San Diego. Soon we will be put in front of computer terminals, where we will follow Epstein's instructions and, yes, do our best to seem human. Our purpose is to find out whether 10 judges can tell the difference between humans and artificial-intelligence programs, when they are online at the same time.

Running software that took four years and millions of dollars to develop, Carbonell's machine – or rather, the server farm it's connected to a few miles away – is attempting a task that has bedeviled computer scien tists for half a century. The message isn't encrypted or scrambled or hidden among thousands of documents. I brought along the text, taken from a Spanish newspaper transcript of a 2004 al Qaeda video claiming responsibility for the Madrid train bombings, to test Meaningful Machines' automated translation software. The brainchild of a quirky former used-car salesman named Eli Abir, the company has been designing the system in secret since just after 9/11. Now the application is ready for public scrutiny, on the heels of a research paper that Carbonell – who is also a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the school's Language Technologies Institute – presented at a conference this summer. In it, he asserts that the company's software represents not only the most accurate Spanish-to-English translation system ever created but also a major advance in the field of machine translation. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links.

Twisted rebar, concrete, and splintered furniture lay scattered across the floor of this room. Our view through a jagged hole in the wall looks out on the city, showing steady civilian traffic crossing a bridge over a river below. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. An Army major beside me, Paul Tyrrell, scans the high-rises on the other side of the river through his laser rangefinder. He is the frontline eyes of the coalition, responsible for calling in air strikes. A platoon sergeant named Donald Prado tells Tyrrell that an office tower half a mile to the west is an enemy stronghold. Prado radios in for the Air Force to drop a smoke screen for cover.

ROBONAUT Not all NASA robots drive around poking at rocks. Robonaut is the same size and shape as a person in a space suit, so it can handle tasks typically performed by humans – its hands are even better articulated than an astronaut's gloved digits. The fact that it looks like Boba Fett? This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

For a machine that's changing the world, the device on the lab bench in front of me doesn't look very impressive – it just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A contraption about the size of a human hand moves from side to side along a track. At the far right end of its trajectory, a proboscis-like pipette pecks into a foil-covered plastic container and sucks up some liquid; the hand moves a foot or so to the left, and the pipette squirts out the liquid a few drops at a time onto a rectangular plastic platter covered with an array of 96 tiny depressions. Then it repeats the routine. Whirr, plunge, suck, whirr, plunge, squirt – a mechanical counterpoint to the cries of the seagulls outside the lab in this Welsh coastal town of Aberystwyth.