Dragon founder moves to new job
Jim Baker, who along with wife Janet started Dragon Naturally Speaking ten years ago, is moving to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University to direct a new center focused on language technology used by the Defense Department. The goal of the project, nicely summarized in a recent Baltimore Sun article, will be to understand conversational speech well enough to catch bad guys planning to hurt the U.S.
DNS apparently didn't really catch on till v8.0, released in 2004, so it may be a similarly long time before Baker and others get something useful out of this $48M grant. Unfortunately it's one of those problems that may never be solved. If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know how hard it is to follow a conversation when you don't fully understand the context, either related to the specifics or to the entire cultural background involved. Often to really understand something, you need "to have been there." Until we can give computers the full context -- the shared context, including culture -- we're not going to get much new out of these systems.
