Work with me here, as I have confused even myself with this…
…a type of computer, robot, or other such electronic device that has every possible word in your language in it’s built in data base. You can speak to/into it and it is able to decipher your tone of voice and the words that you speak to it, and is able to respond as inteligently as it possibly can, thus leading to a type of conversation between you and the device. You could add new names, places, words, and other such things to it’s data base which would allow you to talk about Uncle Bob or anyone else you know, etc…
…call me crazy, but would that not be interesting in a way? Sure, it might make some people total social outcasts, but would be a neat little thing to amaze people, lol. So, does this exsist, and if not, would it be possible one day?
There is SmarterChild on AIM (There used to be a bot on AIM/AOL who you could talk to. It is actually quite amusing and was suprisingly accurate/good at carrying a conversation.) I don’t think it is around anymore, though. I haven’t seem him online in ages. Maybe if you google “SmarterChild” something will come up.
I have done that, and it is amusing to say the least, but it’s a very minute type of what I’m talking about. Nice to throw that one out there though, thanks.
Hijack regarding SmarterChild - SmarterChild itself moved to MSN Messenger. http://www.smarterchild.com has a plugin you must download to talk to him. On AIM, though, AustinPowers is basically SmarterChild with a few catchphrases and a lackadaisical attitude to swearing (instead of trying to get you to apologize for it for months).
There are several possible questions that you could be asking here, and the answer to each of them is different.
You could be asking for a machine that transcribes speech. This would be a machine that you can speak into which can write down the words that you have spoken. Yes, I gather that acceptable versions of this exist, although they often make mistakes and transcribe words that only sound like what you really said. Furthermore, they don’t do punctuation and breaking things up into sentences well. It’s necessary for someone to create the program to do this for each language, so you can’t create a machine which does this for any random language. But if we limit ourself to English, yes, there are such machines. It’s necessary to adjust the machine to your particular accent and manner of speaking. It works much better if you speak slowly. But I should make clear that this is a difficult program to write. It would take a major research project to do this for each language you want to include.
You could be asking if there are machines that will transcribe your speech and translate it into another language. Well, sort of. You could hook up the machine mentioned in the last paragraph with one of the machines that can make rough translations from one language to another. These are very rough translations, filled with errors. Again, writing a program to make rough translations from one language to another is a major research project, and it has to be done separately for each pair of languages. But if you want, say, a machine that will transcribe English and write out the translation in French, you might be able to get this. The real problem is that the transcription program will probably not break up the words into sentences well, so the translation program will probably have problems translating long sentences and long sets of sentences.
You could be asking if it’s possible to make a machine that listens to what you say and replies coherently. No, we’re nowhere near to creating such a machine. Yeah, there are stupid psychiatrist programs which do things such as (when you type in a sentence like “I had a dream last night about my mother”) replying with a canned sentence like “Tell me about your dream” or “Why do you dream about your mother,” and it’s possible that we could attach the transcription program to the stupid psychiatrist program. But we are nowhere close to having a program that understands what you are saying and replies to you with a coherent conversation.
It sounds like your question is whether or not we can create general artificial intelligence (after all, what is another person but an animal that can do all those things you mentioned). It certainly hasn’t been done yet.
As for whether or not it ever will be… well, that’s a good question.
