Researchers at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp have developed interactive software that allows humans to speak to computers, according to reports from Reuters. The computer responds through a human face that appears on the screen, a spokesperson for the company said. The user can also question the machine while it is talking, just like in natural conversation.
For example, users can ask the machine to record a TV program simply by telling the machine the name of the show. Or phone up the computer to ask it to retrieve information and perform specified tasks. NTT said existing voice recognition software can only understand grammatically correct, complete sentences and is thrown off track by the hesitations and stutters common in natural speech. The new software, it said, can pick up words as they are spoken and carry out commands before a sentence is finished.
The company said it hopes to develop more functions for the software, which are now limited to scheduling and video recording. The software is still at the research stage, however, and is not expected to be commercially available for some time.
