Sometimes it's not what you say, but how you say it. That's a truism most people can relate to-but computers can't. While speech recognition software has gotten quite good at understanding words, it still can't discern punctuation like periods and commas, or choose between ambiguous sentences whose meanings depend on the speaker's emotion. That's because such software still can't make sense of the intonations, emphases and pauses-collectively known as prosody-that people intuitively use to make such distinctions.

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