I think we are still very far away from NLU. There are a couple of tiny subproblems such as Entity Extraction, Relation Extraction and Dependency Parsing that w

I think we are still very far away from NLU. There are a couple of tiny subproblems such as Entity Extraction, Relation Extraction and Dependency Parsing that we have become pretty good at (for English that is, but for many languages even that is still difficult). However, once you get into pragmatics and contextual understanding we still have no clue. And in order to enable real NLU you'd also need to ability to do reasoning on top of other knowledge (and "common sense"), which is a whole different problem. Based on products like Siri or Cortana it may seem like we are coming closer to NLU, but the reason those are working at all is because they are very topic-specific and tiny subproblems of what NLU is really about.