It’s like software understands, um, language

EU researchers have taken speech recognition to a whole new level by creating software that can understand spontaneous language. It will, like, make human-machine interaction, um, work a lot more, er, smoothly.
Automated speech recognition has revolutionised customer relations for banks, allowing them to respond quickly and with less staff to more low-level queries. It has helped to enable online banking and the development of more advanced private and public services because machines can handle routine matters, leaving people to take care of more serious issues.
But this technology has its limits. The most common, very basic, voice system asks a series of questions or offers a series of options, slowly and fitfully narrowing down your problem or supplying the solution. It would be nice to just tell the service what you want.
Soon, you can, thanks to the work of the Luna project, a European-wide effort to dramatically advance the power and intelligence of speech recognition. The team is moving the system from utterances – like ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘account’ – to spontaneous speech, such as ‘I want to get the balance on my current account.’ [click heading for more]