[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
How did you get interested in machine intelligence and speech recognition? I was watching Knight Rider, the television series from the ’80s, as a child, and I was very much attached to the idea that machines should be talking with humans to the level at which they can understand emotion.
Are you optimistic about further breakthroughs? In machine learning and artificial intelligence, we’ve always seen a sort of pattern. Every now and then there is a new push forward in the field, a new success and new breakthrough, which is significant. Then maybe those expectations have been disappointed to some degree. Maybe every 10 years there is new big push forward.
I am very excited at the moment about all that is happening, because to me, 17 years later, since I really started to do research on this, it is a really exciting moment to see how spoken dialogue systems have found their way to use. We will very soon see systems gain emotional and social intelligence. Are we tired? Do we have a cold? Are we eating at the moment? These kinds of things are really giving us all sorts of insight to machine comprehension, behavior and social behavior. This might even be a game changer for society.
This interview was produced in conjunction with the World Economic Forum.
