How Silicon Valley is teaching language to machines

The dream of building computers or robots that communicate like humans has been with us for many decades now. And if market trends and investment levels are any guide, it's something we would really like to have. MarketsandMarkets says the natural language processing (NLP) industry will be worth $16.07 billion by 2021, growing at a rate of 16.1 percent, and deep learning is estimated to reach $1.7 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 65.3 percent between 2016 and 2022. Of course, if you've played with any chatbots, you will know that it's a promise that is yet to be fulfilled. There's an "uncanny valley" where, at one end, we sense we're not talking to a real person and, at the other end, the machine just doesn't "get" what we mean.