KMS

Artificial Intelligence is the future. Specifically right now natural language processing and voice recognition is very useful. In our world being hands free is a necessity. IBM’s Watson uses this. Watson has tackled the process of hearing the words, processing them, and formulating an answer. “Watson's ability to understand the meaning and context of human language, and rapidly process information to find precise answers to complex questions…The technology could be applied in areas such as healthcare, for accurately diagnosing patients, to improve online self-service help desks, to provide tourists and citizens with specific information regarding cities, prompt customer support via phone, and much more.” (1) This past year Watson appeared on Jeopardy and it was just amazing. Of course in some situations the human mind was faster but it was remarkable to watch a computer take human words process them and come up with the correct answer. This is just the beginning IBM is continuing to work on Watson and it can only get better.

Right now the public has the opportunity to use natural language processing in the new iPhone 4Gs in Siri. As a user Siri listen to you and can perform many basic tasks such as search the web, send text messages, and emails. I have personally experienced Siri and it is unbelievable even when you say something like “You are dumb” she responds with a witty comment such as “Well that is your opinion”. Siri can only perform tasks in iOS but in no time it will be performing many other tasks. Right now Siri stores the information it provides to its users but in the future Siri could do this,“ Imagine if this same logical power could be applied to any application. Say you're a sales rep and your manager has shared a spreadsheet with regional sales estimates. If you have updated figures for your territory, instead of hunting and pecking changes on the tiny touchscreen keyboard, wouldn't it be nice to say, "Siri, change the sales estimate for the Northwest region from 750,000 to 900,000". (2)

This is just the beginning for us there is so much more to come. Medicine is the focus of the future of natural language processing. “using natural-language processing to make better sense of medical records, which often contain unstructured narrative notes and abbreviations…The principal technical challenges include developing natural-language processing methods that allow computer programs to automatically extract clinical files, events and relationships from the narrative text in records, and to combine the resulting data with existing information from laboratory tests and prescription orders to identify patients' conditions and current treatments. . “

Works Cited:

(1) - "IBM and Jeopardy! Relive History with Encore Presentation of Jeopardy!: The IBM Challenge." IBM. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. IBM and Jeopardy! Relive History with Encore Presentation of Jeopardy!: The IBM Challenge. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27297.wss

(2) - "How Siri Could Make Collaboration Mobile - Telecom - Unified Communications/messaging - Informationweek." InformationWeek | Business Technology News, Reviews and Blogs. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

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