In testing with a Baxter robot, ComText understood commands 90 percent of the time. That's not reliable enough to be used in the field, but it shows that the underlying concept is sound.

Of course, robots are still a long way from understanding all the vagaries of human language. They won't know what you see as a snack unless you teach them first, for instance, and CSAIL wants to address this with future work. However, it's already evident that systems like ComText will be crucial to making autonomous robots useful in the real world, where people generally don't want (or expect) to issue explicit commands every time they need something done. You could speak to robot helpers almost as if they were human, rather than carefully choosing your words.