Even extremely basic commands are routinely misunderstood by humans, too.
With the human you can have a conversation that will hopefully avoid similar confusion in the future which eases the frustration for many. How long before machines allow us to do the same? My bet is months, a year or two at the outside. After all, we already have conversational interactions. Building on those and tying an intent interpretation to a clarifying correction provides high information training data. There's already a swath of old, well understood ML techniques -- mean subtraction, singular value decomposition, boosting, etc. -- aimed at differentiating information from data. Instantaneous classification of responses as errors followed by information on a better response? That sounds like training gold.
With the human you can have a conversation that will hopefully avoid similar confusion in the future which eases the frustration for many. How long before machines allow us to do the same? My bet is months, a year or two at the outside. After all, we already have conversational interactions. Building on those and tying an intent interpretation to a clarifying correction provides high information training data. There's already a swath of old, well understood ML techniques -- mean subtraction, singular value decomposition, boosting, etc. -- aimed at differentiating information from data. Instantaneous classification of responses as errors followed by information on a better response? That sounds like training gold.