Spoken Language Understanding for Natural Interaction

Natural language interaction has the potential to considerably enhance user experience, especially in mobile devices like smartphones and electronic tablets. Recent advances in software integration and efforts toward more personalization and context awareness have brought closer the long-standing vision of the ubiquitous intelligent personal assistant. Multiple voice-driven initiatives by a number of well-known companies have now reached commercial deployment. In this talk, I will review the two major semantic interpretation frameworks underpinning virtual personal assistance, and reflect on the inherent complementarity in their respective advantages and drawbacks. I will then discuss some of the attendant choices made in the practical deployment of such systems, and speculate on their likely evolution going forward.