Google has hired artificial intelligence and speech recognition guru Ray Kurzweil as director of engineering.

The accuracy of speech recognition is on a course of continuous improvement. Much attention is directed to go beyond speech recognition to understand the intent of the spoken word.

Speech recognition interfaces to backend services will improve the user experience to the point that voice will become the predominant computer-human interaction.

“Developing natural language understanding so Google’s computers can read everything and really understand [the content, and] do a more intelligent job of search,” is how Kurzweil described his new job at Google to The Wall Street Journal. […]