In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic ...

A computer that translates “natural language” is the holy grail of artificial intelligence—language being so integral to our intelligence and to our humanness that to crack it would be to achieve ...

Ask most computer programmers what would happen if, suddenly, their computers got a thousand times faster. Most would rhapsodize about being able to immediately put that extra power to good use. Ask ...

Kurzweil shares his thoughts on the future of language technology. We live in a world where language technologies, still in their infancy, are powerful enough to turn your web browser into a text ...

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the nuisance of communicating in a different language? Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related ...

Imagine it’s the 1950s and you’re in charge of one of the world’s first electronic computers. A company approaches you and says: “We have 10 million words of French text that we’d like to translate ...

The Internet is an American invention, and though it has spread around the world, the bulk of the communication conducted through it is still in English. Even so, depending on what you're doing, you ...

AI and machine learning systems have become increasingly competent in recent years, capable of not just understanding the written word but writing it as well. But while these artificial intelligences ...

In the 23rd century, people will use a gizmo that looks suspiciously like a flashlight to communicate with alien species. That’s in the world of “Star Trek.” In the here and now, a small Marina del ...