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Katrina Rippel is a careful speaker who follows all the rules. Hao Chen is a more freewheeling conversationalist. And I'm a nonstop troublemaker, constantly blurting out whatever notions pass through my head. On a recent morning, the three of us met in cyberspace to find out how well (or poorly) we could communicate in a mixture of German, Mandarin, and English. Each of us spoke only our native language.

There are more than a hundred of these geometric symbols. At first I tap at them like a monkey at a typewriter. Eventually I learn how to piece a few together to ask a question. Made by Grant Kuning, a developer based in Washington, DC, Sethian is a game in which you learn a language to solve a mystery. It gives you the keyboard of an alien computer and leaves you to work out what happened to the inhabitants of a planet that seems to have been abandoned for centuries.

Google Translate is getting brainier. The online translation tool recently started using a neural network to translate between some of its most popular languages – and the system is now so clever it can do this for language pairs on which it has not been explicitly trained. To do this, it seems to have created its own artificial language. Traditional machine-translation systems break sentences into words and phrases, and translate each individually. In September, Google Translate unveiled a new system that uses a neural network to work on entire sentences at once, giving it more context to figure out the best translation.

As the tech world salivates over its game-changing potential, Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company plans to first use artificial intelligence for customer service rather than for something like trip-planning. Another plus on the side of business versus leisure travel is that business travelers aren't as focused on price, Walker said, adding they expect high-quality service. Gerstner stated that startups such as venture-backed Lola are trying to combine artificial intelligence, messaging and human travel agents but he predicted that a revival of the travel agent sector isn't in the offing. "When you start thinking about machine learning, Big Data, AI -- whatever you want to call it – … the advantage is to the largest player because they have all the data," Gerstner said.

WaveNet, as the system is called, generates voices by sampling real human speech and directly modeling audio waveforms based on it, as well as its previously generated audio. In Google's tests, both English and Mandarin Chinese listeners found WaveNet more realistic than other types of text-to-speech programs, although it was less convincing than actual human speech. The alternative is parametric text to speech -- building a completely computer-generated voice, using coded rules based on grammar or mouth sounds. Google's system is still based on real voice input.

Watson APIs are now available for public use, albeit only through IBM's Bluemix cloud services platform. IBM's Watson Developer Cloud now offers eight services for building what IBM describes as cognitive apps, with more services promised later on. The Relationship Extraction system seems less limited by available data than Machine Translation, but it is limited in different ways. When the Relationship Extraction system is fed the sentence "Nick Cave's new film '20,000 Days on Earth' debuted yesterday," it understood that "Nick Cave" was a person and that "yesterday" was a date, but didn't understand that "20,000 Days" referred to the title of a work.

A new speech recognition system can transcribe English or Mandarin about three times faster than humans can type on a smartphone, according to a recent study. SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg's First Stop in China: Baidu Headquarters The study, a collaboration between Stanford University, Baidu and the University of Washington, also found that the system produced 20.4 percent fewer errors than people typing in English and 63.8 percent fewer than people working in Mandarin. "We're putting speech recognition up against people who are really good at this task," study co-author James Landay told Stanford News. The system produced 20.4 percent fewer errors than people typing in English and 63.8 percent fewer than people working in Mandarin.

Baidu's Deep Speech 2 is a cloud-based voice recognition software based on a deep learning neural network. "But we were noticing that in the past two to three years, speech recognition was actually improving a lot, benefiting from big data and deep learning to train its neural networks to produce faster, more accurate results. For English, the speech recognition software was three times faster with a 20.4 percent low error rate. For Mandarin Chinese, the software was 2.8 times faster with a 63.4 percent lower error rate compared to typing.

The same app that Van used to reduce her native Vietnamese accent could help an American moving to Vietnam learn a local Vietnamese accent. "Growing up in Vietnam, speaking English is a big advantage. Elsa users are primarily from the non-English speaking world but there are also users from say, Atlanta, as well as other native English speakers, Van said. Elsa Speak users are primarily professionals and students, but love is also a chief motivator.