Lobal Technologies of London is building a natural language processing system called LAD (Language Acquisition Device) that understands sentences word by word and builds its replies word-by-word, rather than just reading a script.The system is based on a model of the human brain, with emulators for the five brain areas that are most important for language processing, built using neural network technology

Lobal’s roadmap for developing LAD is based on the development of a human child. He’s about 18 months old now. The company hopes to give LAD the linguistic skills of a six-year-old child with a 1,000 word vocabulary by this time next year.

The company next plans to work on building the technology into computer games.