Robotic dialogs
One of the impulses that got me into the speech and language processing business was the pure cool of working on artificial intelligence, and the lure of its holy grail the Turing Test. Even simple programs like Eliza (from decades before - I'm not that old, OK) had made it feel within reach.
That impulse is still there. And if my free time were still copious (it's not, sadly/happily) I'd be coding up a conversational IM bot that runs over Windows Live- or MSN-Messenger, and gunning for some of the $40,000 in prizes and inestimable kudos that's up for grabs. Current entries include Santa Claus, an Encarta agent and 'the dubyabot'. Their conversational abilities appear to be somewhat limited - so how about it? In the speech industry, we've built an arsenal of techniques for conversational NL interpretation and dialog management. Who's up for replacing the spoken word with the written one and unleashing this in bot form on unsuspecting IM users?
