the real research behind this (Score 3, Informative)

WRT to "watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon":

Here's a link to the actual research that they are likely talking about:

http://godel.stanford.edu/~niekrasz/papers/PurverE hlenEtAl06_Shallow.pdf

As you might expect, the ComputerWorld article's summary of the technology is rather optimistic. Nonetheless, this stuff really does exist, and shows some promise in both military and general applications.