I'm thrilled to see the progress made in the last 30 years. As a student in the mid-90s I worked on a system called Verbmobil at the German Research Center for

I'm thrilled to see the progress made in the last 30 years. As a student in the mid-90s I worked on a system called Verbmobil at the German Research Center for AI and it did speech-to-speech for English, German and Japanese in very limited domain. This was done via "classical" NLP: You had to model the domain with concepts, you needed sentence parsers, semantic engines, speech-to-text hand-crafted for 3 languages etc. As it turns out, this approach is/was a dead-end.