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.

The phrase "life's work" is one that seems to be fading into obscurity with each passing year. The ideal of seeing a finish line and giving your all to get across it sometimes seems romanticized -- until you meet someone like Fil Alleva. "I started working in the speech area in 1977," explains the affable Partner Group Engineering Manager. Alleva was planning to be a chemical engineer in his undergraduate years at Carnegie Mellon University in the late '70s when he befriended Professor Raj Reddy in an introductory programming class. Soon after, he found himself taking a 2-an-hour job programming computers, if only because it was a better gig than working in the school cafeteria.