Actually NLP has made great progress in the last few years and there are commerc...

hvs · on May 10, 2013

This is amusing because just today, while I was driving decided to attempt to use Siri (something I do about once a month to remind me why I don't use it). I said, "Nirvana Nevermind". "Sorry, I don't know how to do that." "Play Nirvana Nevermind". "Sorry, I don't know how to do that." "Search music Nirvana Nevermind". "Sorry, I can't search for music."

Great stuff, that NLP.

indubitably · on May 10, 2013

Well, your last example is evidence that there was a successful interpretation of the sentence.

Things like machine translation, text to speech, and natural language understanding will only gradually get better.

If you compare how well something like Siri does now (not very well) to similar “tools” 10 years ago (awful), it’s hard to deny that some progress has been made.

rhizome · on May 10, 2013

I'd say it's not too far advanced beyond where IVRs were 5-10 years ago. It's a hard problem.

acheron · on May 10, 2013

That's funny because I was just recently thinking how impressed I was that Siri could play random album titles when I asked.

Maybe she doesn't like Nirvana.