17. A conversational understanding system for addressee detection, comprising: a computer processor and memory; an operating environment executed by the computer processor; and an addressee manager that is configured to perform actions comprising: receiving an utterance; extracting prosodic features from speech segments of the received utterance; performing an evaluation of the extracted prosodic features to determine whether the intended addressee is a computer or a human, wherein the evaluation is word-independent, context-independent, and speaker independent; in response to determining that the intended addressee is the computer, processing the utterance to generate a response for the received utterance; and outputting the response through the conversational understanding system.
17. A conversational understanding system for addressee detection, comprising: a computer processor and memory; an operating environment executed by the computer processor; and an addressee manager that is configured to perform actions comprising: receiving an utterance; extracting prosodic features from speech segments of the received utterance; performing an evaluation of the extracted prosodic features to determine whether the intended addressee is a computer or a human, wherein the evaluation is word-independent, context-independent, and speaker independent; in response to determining that the intended addressee is the computer, processing the utterance to generate a response for the received utterance; and outputting the response through the conversational understanding system. 19. The system of claim 17 , wherein the performed actions further comprise: determining the intended addressee based on features of the received utterance, wherein the features comprise of a peak count, a rate, a mean and a max distance apart, an intensity value, and a location and a value for the highest peak of the received utterance.