It's funny how we're all working from different definitions of the word "problem" - I'm certainly not changing the world with medical supplies for developing countries, renewable energy, payment systems and so on.
But it's something I'm really passionate about, and I'd be over the moon if I came anywhere close to the picture I have in my mind.
Back when I was studying German and Chinese, I would spend hours and hours on rote practice with little to show for it. My brain almost felt like it was on autopilot - the eyes would read the words and the hands would write the sentences, but the neurons weren't really firing. It didn't feel like I was properly building the synaptic bridges necessary to actually use those words in conversation.
On the flipside, after just 20 minutes speaking with a tutor, my proficiency would improve leaps and bounds. Being forced to map actual, real-world thoughts/concepts to the words/expressions I had learned - that's what made everything clicked. It felt like the difference between just reading a chapter in a maths textbook, and actually doing the exercises.
So after keeping track of progress in NLP and speech recognition/synthesis in recent years, it seemed like a logical time to start. Progress is slow/incremental, but it is there.