Artificial Intelligence/Expert Profile

Expertise

I can answer questions about speech recognition and natural language understanding. I am particulary strong in knowedge based natural langauge techniques. I cannot answer questions about robotics, nueral nets, prolog, or vision recognition - just speech and natural language.

Experience in the area

I have spent 25 years developing natural language software products. I have never developed speech systems, but I have developed sophisticated interfaces from natural language to speech. I have been working with speech recognition systems also for 25 years.

What do you like about this subject?

Imagine being able to talk to your computer and have it understand you and help you get your work done. Imagine not needing to learn complex software menu trees, becuase you just ask and the system does it for you. This is what is just now occuring in the speech and natural language fields.

What do you still hope to achieve/learn in this field?

I am currently working on a 7th generation natural language engine that is regarded by peers in my field as one the most advanced in existance. Our vision is to allow people to talk to machines without knowing any technical jargon and get the results they need.

Something interesting about this subject that others may not know:

Speech recognition and natural language are just now reaching a crital mass of capability. This technology is just now breaking out in a big way.

Something controversial or provocative about this subject

While some people have bad experiences with speech or language recognition in the past, steady progress has been nade over the past several decades. This has been and still is the most difficult area of computer science