Speaker-Independent Voice Recognition

Long the stuff of science fiction, speaker-independent voice recognition is now an everyday feature of telephone-based customer service, and an increasingly important and vital user interface mode for smartphones and mobile devices. Now, high-profile research programs, such as IBM's Watson, are pushing the envelope: learning how to make machines that answer questions posed in natural language. This edition of eWEEK’s Deeper Thinking shows what such technologies can do today, and how they’re being used by companies to improve their business operations.