In 1969 Pierce wrote that both the funders and eager researchers had often fooled themselves, and that “no simple, clear, sure knowledge is gained.” After that, America’s government largely closed the money tap, and research on language technology went into hibernation for two decades. Reviewing almost a decade of work on machine translation and automatic speech recognition, it concluded that the time had come to spend money “hard-headedly toward important, realistic and relatively short-range goals”-another way of saying that language-technology research had overpromised and underdelivered. In the period leading up to this, scholars had been promising automatic translation between languages within a few years.īut the report was scathing. Having overseen the team that had built the first transistor and the first communications satellite, he enjoyed a sterling reputation, so he was asked to take charge of a report on the state of automatic language processing for the National Academy of Sciences. In 1966 John Pierce was working at Bell Labs, the research arm of America’s telephone monopoly. Many of those discouraged users may not realise how much they have improved.
Only around a third of smartphone owners use their personal assistants regularly, even though 95% have tried them at some point, according to Creative Strategies, a consultancy. When Apple introduced Siri in 2011 it was frustrating to use, so many people gave up. Alexa can even respond to a request to “tell me a joke”, but only by calling upon a database of corny quips. Computerised personal assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana, can now take a wide variety of questions, structured in many different ways, and return accurate and useful answers in a natural-sounding voice. Machine translation, too, has gone from terrible to usable for getting the gist of a text, and may soon be good enough to require only modest editing by humans.
Speech recognition has made remarkable advances. After six decades of work, much of it with disappointing outcomes, the past few years have produced results much closer to what early pioneers had hoped for. They can help people spend more time doing interesting things that only humans can do. Yet although language technologies are nowhere near ready to replace human beings, except in a few highly routine tasks, they are at last about to become good enough to be taken seriously. Artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers can only laugh when asked about the prospect of an intelligent HAL, Terminator or Rosie (the sassy robot housekeeper in “The Jetsons”). I didn’t understand the question.” “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I have a list of eBay results about pod doors, Dave.”Ĭreative and truly conversational computers able to handle the unexpected are still far off. If “2001” had been made to reflect the state of today’s language technology, the conversation might have gone something like this: “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave. Even so, communication remains difficult. Since then, humankind has progressed quite a lot farther with building machines that it can talk to, and that can respond with something resembling natural speech. When the film came out in 1968, computers that could have proper conversations with humans seemed nearly as far away as manned flight to Jupiter. HAL’s decision to turn on his human companion reflected a wave of fear about intelligent computers. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” With chilling calm, HAL 9000, the on-board computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, refuses to open the doors to Dave Bowman, an astronaut who had ventured outside the ship. But they still don’t understand the meaning of language Computers have got much better at translation, voice recognition and speech synthesis, says Lane Greene.
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