In the area of education, the promise of intelligent tutoring systems was recognized even in the 1960s,12 but real progress has been a long time coming. The primary reasons are shortcomings of content and access: most tutoring systems don’t understand the content of what they purport to teach, nor can they engage in two-way communication with their pupils through speech or text. (I imagine myself teaching string theory, which I don’t understand, in Laotian, which I don’t speak.) Recent progress in speech recognition means that automated tutors can, at last, communicate with pupils who are not
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