We're long past the deadline for building the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1992 in the movie, '97 if you prefer the book), and a computer that can actually have a conversation with you is still a ways off. But an Israeli company may have just taken a big step toward the chatty PC. Linguistic Agents has developed a new technology that will let machines better understand human speech. The company's "NanoSyntax" is a software program that is said to understand the meaning of customer inquiries in a natural language, such as English. It works by looking at words not as simply mechanical parts of a sentence, but as "encoded packages" that humans use to deliver information.

Right now the software is being used with a yellow-pages directory and a bus system as part of automated help lines, but other applications could be advanced websites that work with spoken input queries or interactive games where you could verbally talk to the characters. But most important, it could help you get through automated menus more quickly, so you wouldn't have to wait for a voice to read you a list of options. Instead you'd just tell the computer what you want, and it would direct you to the right person or automated response. Something tells me, "Get me a damn human already!" will still be a pretty standard request. — Peter Suciu