20 IDEAS
FE ATURE- NATURAL
LANGUAGE GADGETS
GET WEIRD
Speech-enabled tech, like
Alexa, Siri or Google
Voice, will start to shape
our own speech
The fantasy of controlling our devices
through speech is becoming a reality,
even though they can only handle
simple commands or enquiries and their
speech patterns sound robotic. The next
step is getting them to understand and
respond in natural language – the sort of
conversational exchanges humans use.
Google seemed to have made progress
when it unveiled its Duplex system in
- An add-on for its Assistant app,
Duplex employs more sophisticated
types of AI to understand and use
natural language to book restaurant
tables and hair appointments, or ask
about a business’s opening hours. If
the booking couldn’t be made online,
Assistant would handover to Duplex,
which would call the restaurant and
speak to the staff to book you in.
According to reports, people that spoke
to Duplex said they didn’t realise they
were talking to a machine. The trouble
was, Duplex often ran into complications
and needed someone to step in.
Despite this setback, Google and other
developers are still working on ways to
bring natural language to our devices.
Understanding the human brain is a
monumental task, but that hasn’t stopped
neuroscience stepping up to meet the challenge.
There’s the Human Brain Project, one of the
largest ever EU-funded projects, the $5 billion
BRAIN Initiative in the US, and the more
recently announced China Brain Project.
One of the aims of the US initiative, launched
in 2013, is to map all the neurons in the brain as
well as their connections. Starting with the
mouse brain, the view is to move towards the
same goal in humans. It could “help us crack
the code the brain uses to drive behaviour,” says
Joshua Gordon, one of the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) project directors. But he admits it
won’t happen overnight. Take the Human
Genome Project for example, a simple map
won’t provide all the answers and it may take
many years to figure out how the physical
features of the brain relate to memories,
thoughts, actions and emotions.
For a start, the brain’s ‘code’ can’t be writtenA HUMAN BRAIN MAP
The plan to write a set of
instructions for the human
brain takes shape10
GET T Y IMAGES, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2, REUTERS