An accessible explanation of the technologies that enable such popular voice-interactive applications as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.Have you talked to a machine lately? Asked Alexa to play a song, asked Siri to call a friend, asked Google Assistant to make a shopping list? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a nontechnical and accessible explanation of the technologies that enable these popular devices. Roberto Pieraccini, drawing on more than thirty years of experience at companies including Bell Labs, IBM, and Google, describes the developments in such fields as artificial intelligence, machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding that allow us to outsource tasks to our ubiquitous virtual assistants.Pieraccini describes the software components that enable spoken communication between humans and computers, and explains why it's so difficult to build machines that understand humans. He explains speech recognition technology; problems in extracting meaning from utterances in order to execute a request; language and speech generation; the dialog manager module; and interactions with social assistants and robots. Finally, he considers the next big challenge in the development of virtual assistants: building in more intelligence--enabling them to do more than communicate in natural language and endowing them with the capacity to know us better, predict our needs more accurately, and perform complex tasks with ease.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems, PIT 2008, held in Kloster Irsee, Germany, in June 2008. The 37 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited keynote lecture were carefully selected from numerous submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimodal and spoken dialogue systems, classification of dialogue acts and sound, recognition of eye gaze, head poses, mimics and speech as well as combinations of modalities, vocal emotion recognition, human-like and social dialogue systems, and evaluation methods for multimodal dialogue systems.

An accessible explanation of the technologies that enable such popular voice-interactive applications as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.Have you talked to a machine lately? Asked Alexa to play a song, asked Siri to call a friend, asked Google Assistant to make a shopping list? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a nontechnical and accessible explanation of the technologies that enable these popular devices. Roberto Pieraccini, drawing on more than thirty years of experience at companies including Bell Labs, IBM, and Google, describes the developments in such fields as artificial intelligence, machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding that allow us to outsource tasks to our ubiquitous virtual assistants.Pieraccini describes the software components that enable spoken communication between humans and computers, and explains why it's so difficult to build machines that understand humans. He explains speech recognition technology; problems in extracting meaning from utterances in order to execute a request; language and speech generation; the dialog manager module; and interactions with social assistants and robots. Finally, he considers the next big challenge in the development of virtual assistants: building in more intelligence--enabling them to do more than communicate in natural language and endowing them with the capacity to know us better, predict our needs more accurately, and perform complex tasks with ease.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems, PIT 2008, held in Kloster Irsee, Germany, in June 2008. The 37 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited keynote lecture were carefully selected from numerous submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimodal and spoken dialogue systems, classification of dialogue acts and sound, recognition of eye gaze, head poses, mimics and speech as well as combinations of modalities, vocal emotion recognition, human-like and social dialogue systems, and evaluation methods for multimodal dialogue systems.