Why people will beat machines in recognising speech for a long time yet

Description

Imagine a world in which Siri always understands you, Google Translate works perfectly, and the two of them create something akin to a Doctor Who style translation circuit. Imagine being able to communicate freely wherever you go (not having to mutter in school French to your Parisian waiter). It’s an attractive, but still distant prospect. One of the bottlenecks in moving this reality forward is variation in language, especially spoken language. Technology cannot quite cope with it.