The long quest for technology that understands speech as well as a human

Sitting in his office overlooking downtown Bellevue, Washington, Microsoft's Fil Alleva is talking about the long and sometimes difficult road he and other speech recognition experts have taken from the early work of the 1970s to the situation he is in today, where he can turn to his computer and say, "Cortana, I want a pizza" and get results. The conversation quickly drifts deeply into the technology that makes something like that possible, and then Alleva pauses. "What we all had in the back of our minds, whether we say it or not, was C-3PO," he admits with a grin. The personable "Star Wars" character who can understand and speak millions of languages may not have been the only inspiration for the world's leading researchers – some also will say that the universal translator that was featured prominently in "Star Trek" spurred their dreams along. But regardless of whether they were "Star Wars" fans or "Star Trek" loyalists, one thing is clear: The quest to create a computer that can understand spoken language as well as a person was for years so fanciful that the only thing to compare it to was science fiction.