Machines Learn to Mimic Speech

Wired magazine ran an article on advances in speech technology. Probably next year I should attend SpeechTek. Will lots of ideas and software components for voiceML project -

Technology that tries hard to understand what humans are saying, and what they are probably attempting to say, was front and center at the show.

Products such as Nuance's "say anything" natural-language applications allow customers to babble blithely to automated customer service call systems and still be understood, thanks to a database that can quickly extract key concepts and infer intent from what speech programmers sometimes bitterly refer to as "freestyle conversations."

"You have no idea how nonsensical and jumbled an average conversation is until you try to code a computer program that can make sense of it," said George Funtello, a speech application programmer who was among the show's attendees.