Waking up Alexa or Google with a question works well enough in the relatively unchanging home environment. But when trying to control robots in a combat environment, asking Alexa politely to find the source of enemy fire is a whole different challenge. That's why U.S. Army and academic researchers joined forces to develop a better way to interact and control autonomous systems such as mobile robots. Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory (ARL), in collaboration with the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, developed a new conversational model called the Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface (JUDI) capability. The approach to speech recognition "enables bi-directional conversational interactions between soldiers and autonomous systems," according to a statement from the U.S. Army.

Researchers at Microsoft have published details of new speech recognition technology that they say transcribes conversational speech as well as a human does. "We've reached human parity," says Microsoft's chief speech scientist Xuedong Huang in a statement. "This is an historic achievement." The system's word error rate is reported to be 5.9 percent, which Microsoft says is "about equal" to professional transcriptionists asked to work on speech taken from the same Switchboard corpus of conversations. It uses neural language models that group similar words together, allowing for efficient generalization. Microsoft plans to use the technology in Cortana, its personal voice assistant for Windows and the Xbox One, as well as speech-to-text transcription software.