Introduction
In 1950, the British mathematician Alan Turing devised the Imitation Game, which has become known as the Turing Test and hypothesizes that if a dialog is natural enough, you might not know whether you're conversing with a human or a computer. As artificial intelligence (AI) grows ever more sophisticated, this kind of conversational interaction with applications and digital assistants is becoming more and more common, and in specific scenarios can result in human-like interactions with AI agents. Common scenarios for this kind of solution include customer support applications, reservation systems, and home automation among others.
To realize the aspiration of the imitation game, computers need not only to be able to accept language as input (either in text or audio format), but also to be able to interpret the semantic meaning of the input - in other words, understand what is being said.
Microsoft Azure supports conversational language understanding through Azure AI Language service. One example using conversational language understanding is an application that's able to turn devices on and off based on speech. Many types of tasks involving command and control, end-to-end conversation, and enterprise support can be completed with Azure AI Language's conversational language understanding feature.