How machines learn to talk

Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri or Google’s assistant are able to converse with humans using language. The underlying technology – often referred to as spoken dialogue systems – have experienced a revolution over the past decade, moving from being completely handcrafted to using data-driven machine learning methods.

Professor Verena Rieser, Professor of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University discusses the advances in machine learning that allows computers to converse with humans using language and both the challenges and opportunities that this technology presents.