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Hey There Eliza: A History of Natural Language Processing

What if computers talked like people? The dream of talking to the computer using natural language is one we've had for as long as computers have been spitting out binary. In this talk, Amanda Lange, Alexa Developer Community Manager, will discuss the long history of speaking natural language to your computer, and getting natural language back. This talk is beginner oriented and is a great starting point to understanding a field that has growing relevance today, while being as nearly old as computation itself. We’ll talk about the technologies involved in language understanding and machine translation, and look at some common pitfalls and fun failures along the way, too. Starting from primitive chat-bots, moving into gaming, and landing in the modern world of chat-GPT and AI assistants, this talk will provide some historical context to technology many use today and look into the future of what is to come.