Getting machines to be able to interpret what human beings mean through spoken language is non-trivial and yet vitally important. Being able to have the ability to parse through what people say as they say it is a hot area since voice is emerging as the go-to user interface for mobile devices, especially smart phones. 

HumansFirst Technology, a start-up out of Scottsdale, Arizona, provides natural language processing as a service through its newly introduced Cold Smoke service, as well as a speech-enabled interface to SalesForce.com and "Her," a personal shopping and travel assistant.

"Our version of natural language processing is different from the standard wikipedia definition," said Humans First CTO Yada Schneider," For us, natural language processing is as simple as giving a system user the ability to accomplish a task by simply speaking naturally."

If you are a fan of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," you can understand how natural language processing  is useful every time Captain Jean Luc Picard got a drink. He would tell his replicator to make him a "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot," rather than naturally saying "Earl Grey tea, please."

Cold Smoke's natural language processing technology parses and analyzes voice input, with the ability to interpret the meaning of words in context, with rules applied to different grammatical categories.  For example, the word "quote" as applied to a stock quote for Apple (News - Alert) is different from looking up a quote from a Martin Luther King speech.

Access to Cold Smoke technology will be straight forward for developers. 

"The Cold Smoke platform is a restful web service interface supporting almost every platform. We will be providing a Mobile Client API for both iOS and Android (News - Alert)," Schneider said. "The client API will give the developers to add speech to text functionality as well as an interface to our Cold Smoke Platform web services.  This will be accomplished with just a few API calls.  On the server side of the things, developers will be given the ability to create custom mappings of language to web services."

Almost "every platform" includes any Android device supporting Internet connectivity and a microphone, with current development focused on native mobile applications. Cold Smoke has interesting prospects to Android Wear and TV applications, with wearable devices gaining the greatest benefits.  Google (News - Alert) Glass, anyone?

Stock browser developers shouldn't feel left out, however.  Since the Cold Smoke platform is a restful web service interface, browser based applications can just as easily access natural language processing services.   Talking to a kiosk or to a web page is just as easy as providing support for mobile devices. Additional features included in Cold Smoke include a history file for users to store personal data and preferences and sample/example code for use of the APIs.

Applications for Cold Smoke are already built and in operation.  The "Her" shopping assistant converts speech to text, which is then passed on to Cold Smoke for language analysis, mapping elements of the input speech to variables in web service calls.   VoiceForce is Humans First's speech interface to Salesforce.Com, with grammatical elements mapped to Salesforce.com (News - Alert) restful web services.

Pricing for VoiceForce and the Cold Smoke SDK is done on a case-by-case basis, dependent up such factors as the number of users, said Schneider.

HumansFirst CTO Yada Schneider will be speaking and available to meet in the “Coco” room at the Smart Voice event at ITEXPO (News - Alert) in Las Vegas, on Monday, August 11.