Robots That Speak Begin to Understand

I've been amazed at how well my iPhone understands my speech, most of the time, for common words. ...but then there have been plenty of times when I gave up after trying several times, especially for complex words, which the phone (or Apple's server) tends to break up into more than one similar sounding set of words.

...and I can definitely understand the speech it generates WAY better than I can understand those human voices on the help lines from India.

Talk about live imitating art.

When Star Wars came out, we, the sci-fi fans, were somewhat confused as to how understanding natural-language voice instructions and commands were part of every droid, while speech synthesis was limited to just a few, mainly those designed to be translators. We had seen speech synthesis already, in a crude form, in computers, by then, but voice recognition was still a a long ways off.

Now we have smartphones we talk to in natural language (well, almost, I still have the habit of using 'clear pause' speech when reciting numbers or alphanumeric strings: "One, seven, zero, ayy, too, three" for example) but speaking in a 'natural' done of voice is still a difficult task, not even Siri, or the voice of Google Navigation, can get that natural sounding cadence.

"I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."