Computers that can speak and understand natural language have long appeared in science fiction. Endowing computers with linguistic capabilities in practice, however, has proven to be exceptionally difficult. Efforts to build automatic translation machines started in the early days of functional computers in the 1950s, and the complex problems thwarted researchers for decades. Recently, however, significant progress has been made, and while machines are far from fully understanding language, useful applications involving language are now possible. Linguistic capabilities can be expected to appear in a wide range of products and applications and to transform the way people think about and interact with computers.