Facebook wants computers to better understand what people say.

The social networking giant unveiled a research project on Monday that is aimed at jump starting the development of more powerful voice-recognition software used in things like Apple’s (AAPL) Siri, Amazon’s (AMZN) Alexa, and Google’s (GOOG)Assistant. And the company asking outsiders for help.

Facebook’s goal is for computers to eventually have meaningful conversations with humans. If successful, it would be a major step forward from current technology, which is still in its early stages.

People can currently do some basics like using their voices to ask Amazon’s Echo home speaker to play the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night or navigate automated phone trees when talking to your cable company. But these technologies are incapable of understanding or correctly responding to more complex conversations, like debating what’s the best Beatles album or arguing over a cable bill.

“If you go out off of the script they don’t perform very well,” Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of artificial intelligence research, or AI.

Advances in AI technologies like deep learning have been useful in teaching computers to recognize cats in photos. But language is more complicated for computers to parse than simply identifying objects in pictures, LeCun explained.

For instance, LeCun said that computers are often stumped by the following two sentences: “The trophy doesn’t fit in your suitcase because it is too large” and “The trophy doesn’t fit in your suitcase because it is too small.”

Understanding both phrases requires deciphering that the “it” refers to either the trophy or the suitcase based on clues from the adjectives “large” and “small.” Humans typically understand that a trophy that is too large would be unable to fit in a suitcase and that a suitcase that is too small would be unable to accommodate a trophy.

Seeb on http://nbslaw.com.ng/2017/05/15/facebooks-plan-create-computers-talk-like-humans/

great technology...!!




hummnnnn.... I'm expecting this to arrive Nigeria by 2037



FTC jareee!!!