Computers That Speak Your Language

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.