laying the groundwork for this kind of human machine interaction is pioneering scientists, barbara groszs of harvard university. for seminal work in what's called natural language processing directly led to the development of voice activated artificial intelligence, like alexa or siri. - natural language processing actually predates artificial intelligence and started with machine translation efforts. - [shivani] the ability for a computer system to carry on a spoken dialogue with a person has been a longstanding goal of artificial intelligence research from its inception. - and it turns out this is a challenge because when you speak, what you say, really depends othe context in which you say it. - [shivani] another challenge is the meaning of words can change depending on how they're delivered. - so one example is the contrast between saying "that's fabulous" and "that's fabulous." also when we have a conversation, we mark paragraphs at the beginning with a rise in intonation and a fall at the end. so there's a whole way the speech signal tells you sothing about the coext and something a