The state of natural language & conversational search in 2018

As human beings, we use our voices for conversation. When we interact with voice interfaces, therefore, our natural instinct is to apply the same rules that we would to a human conversation. We expect to be understood, but more than this, we expect the entity we're conversing with to remember the history of our conversation and understand the context of any following remarks. For some time, major search companies like Google and Bing have worked to teach their search engines to understand queries in natural language. Natural language search queries are queries that sound natural spoken aloud, such as, "How high is the Empire State building?" They often begin with question words ("When…?" "How…?" "Why…?"), contain stop words ("a", "the", "of", "for") and full sentences.