Imagine a day when spoken language sentences can be recognized perfectly by a machine.
It suddenly becomes much easier and more natural to issue commands and pose queries in a natural language, rather than, say in XML. Imagine speaking a C program to someone, syntax and all. That would be really weird!
We recently evaluated spoken language programming by combining a speech recognizer with Vaklipi, our fifth generation programming language.
The results were frankly disappointing.
Here’s a sample conversation between me and my computer:
Cohan
: b is equal to two.
Sphinx hears: b is e equal to two.
Vaklipi [error]: I can’t understand …
Cohan: b equals two.
Sphinx: b equals two.
Cohan: What is b.
Sphinx: What is 8.
Vaklipi: 8.0
Cohan: What is b.
Sphinx: What is b.
Vaklipi: 2.0
I think I’ll wait a few more years ;)