This lecture that took place on Google's campus is great for anyone interested in Natural Language Processing, it goes in depth to describe one very interesting application (Amazability) which draws on everything from speech parsing on down the line. If you don''t think you're interested in NLP, you probably are and just don't know it so watch the video and get an introduction.
“The Adept1 is equipped with voice recognition and text-to-speech output that dynamically adapts multilingual spoken output to context. The Adept1 offers such applications as word processing, email, address book, web browsing, and access to an online library of thousands of books. These applications along with others have been developed from the ground up to work with speech and have a common command language throughout. They can be employed using ordinary speech or typed words and sentences. Thus the product represents a foundation for implementing practical natural language transaction processing where simple English phrases and sentences are interpreted to command a sequence of complex operations.”