W5D4

Week 5 Day 4 Conversational Interfaces

地道表达

Stroll through Sanlitun, a bustling neighborhood in Beijing filled with tourists, karaoke bars, and luxury shops, and you’ll see plenty of people using the latest smartphones from Apple, Samsung, or Xiaomi.

[ Stroll through] 漫步

Eg. We strolled through the park.

Look closely, however, and you might notice some of them ignoring the touch screens on these devices in favor of something much more efficient and intuitive: their voice.

[ intuitive] adj. 有直觉力的;凭直觉获知的

Eg. He seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of how I was feeling.

A growing number of China’s 691 million smartphone users now regularlydispense with swipes, taps, and tiny keyboards when looking things up on the country’s most popular search engine, Baidu.

[ dispense with] 摒弃, 省掉

Eg. Let’s dispense with the formalities.

The systems offer a glimpse of a future in which there’s less need to learn a new interface for every device.

[ a glimpse of] 一瞥

Eg. I caught a glimpse of the falls as our train went by.

No longer limited to just a small set of predetermined commands, it now works even in a noisy environment like the streets of Beijing or when you’re speaking across a room.

[ predetermined] vt. & vi. 预先裁定,注定

Eg. a predetermined signal一个预定信号

Voice-operated virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Now come bundled with most smartphones,

[ bundled with] n. 捆；束,vt. 捆,vi. 匆忙离开

Eg. a bundle of facts.大量事实

And yet in many of China’s poorer regions, where there is perhaps more opportunity for the Internet to have big social and economic effects, literacy levels are still low.

[ literacy]n. 识字, 有文化, 会读写

Eg. literacy education文化教育；读写教育

cue up 提示

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