Human language technologies for the enterprise of the future

Enormous progress has been made in the area of human language technologies over the last few decades. Originally starting with simple systems that could recognize numbers spoken in isolation, researchers can now accurately recognize fluent conversational speech and automatically translate from one language to another. While many challenges still remain, complex systems can now be built from these component technologies to achieve goals once unthinkable, such as simultaneous translation of spoken language in real time on handheld devices.