The Voice in the Machine
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Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model--specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?
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"With the explosive growth in speech applications on Android, iPhone and other devices, The Voice in the Machine is a timely read. It relates the 50+ year quest to develop voice recognition and synthesis, explains how the technologies work, and contains enough anecdotes to make it fun."--Alfred Z. Spector, Vice President of Research, Google, Inc.
"There are many books on speech technology, but this is the first to explain the technology against a backdrop of the broader forces that have shaped the field. This will become a must-read text for those interested in what speech technology is and how it has developed."--Robert Dale, Centre for Language Technology, Macquarie University
"Roberto Pieraccini's fascinating book takes us on a tour of human speech, modern techniques for speech understanding and generation, and the problems of deploying it in real industrial applications. By using examples, he conveys the essence of modern statistical speech processing without resorting to mathematics. This book is both entertaining and educational, and highly recommended."--Steve Young, Professor of Information Engineering, University of Cambridge
"This is a fascinating tour of the development of modern speech technologies and applications…A wonderful historical account of the growth of speech technology." -- C. Tappert, Choice
About the Author
Roberto Pieraccini, Director of ICSI, the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, has been active for more than thirty years in speech research and technology.
Since January 2012 I am the director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, CA, an independent research institution affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley, which includes world-famous scientists in the most disparate computer science disciplines, such as internet networking and security, computer speech and vision, advanced computer architectures, neurosciences and bio-informatics.
I have been in the speech technology research and business for more than 30 years. Prior to joining ICSI, I was the Chief Technology Officer of SpeechCycle, a company specialized in advanced spoken human-machine interaction systems for enterprise customer care (yes, those annoying "please tell me the reason you are calling about" computers that prevent you to talk to human operators when you need them). Trying to make those annoying computers better, I led an effort to develop new technology that tried to make those computers learn from their own mistakes and, hopefully, improve.
Before SpeechCycle, around 2003-2005, I managed a speech research team at IBM T.J. Watson Research, in Yorktown Heights, NY and prior to that, between 1999 and 2003, I was at SpeechWorks International, which is now known as Nuance, today's largest worldwide computer speech company.
The turning point in my computer speech research carrer was when I joined AT&T Bell Laboratories (which became then AT&T Shannon Laboratories) in 1988, where I worked with some of the most influential scientists in computer speech, such as Larry Rabiner. I arrived at Bell Laboratories from Italy, where in the 1980s I was a researcher at CSELT, the laboratories of the national Italian telephone company.
During all this time, I wrote, as an author or co-author, about 150 scientific papers and articles in the fields of speech recognition, spoken language understanding and dialog, multimodal interaction, and machine learning. I am best known for my original contributions to statistical methods for spoken language understanding and machine learning for spoken dialog systems.
My book "The Voice in the Machine" on the history of computer speech understanding technology, published by MIT Press, tells the story of 60 years of computer speech technology, in a way that is accessible to general scientific readers.
Having just completed a course in NLP, I was looking for an introduction to speech processing in order to prep for more advanced reading on the subject. Pieraccini's book was just what I needed.
The author starts out by describing in convincing detail why human speech is so complex and difficult to understand, and to recreate in a lab or a commercial setting. He then goes on to describe early attempts inspired by AI, eventually arriving at statistical approaches that are the basis of most modern speech processing systems.
I like the book in its broad coverage, and while I do realize that the book is not aimed at techies, I'd have appreciated a little more coverage of HMMs and EM.
At a handful of places, there are some editing oversights that are simply disappointing for a book from a writer of this caliber (Ch. 5: "...De Mori, who pursued a brilliant carrier first at McGill..." -- career, not carrier).
Nonetheless, the book is a good read for someone interested in this technology.
As someone who has been in the speech industry for quite some time, I can tell you this book is a terrific starting point for business people and students alike. Pierracini's great anecdotes are what makes this so enjoyable. Whether it's HAL 9000 or Victor Hugo he is employing to convey his point, the author makes learning enjoyable.
This book deserves 6, 7, 8 stars. It takes a technical subject and does a really good job of showing the essence of the issues involved. Be aware that the target audience is NEITHER - people who already understand computer speech technology (unless perhaps they want to learn some history) OR - the intellectually lazy. This is a difficult subject, and to get the most out of it, you will occasionally have to close the book and think about what you have just read.
But assuming you are in this target audience (you're an engineer in another field, a physicist, an astronomer, basically someone curious about the world around you) and want to learn the basic history, ideas, successes, and failures of computer speech understanding, I have never come across a book close to as good as this.
I only wish there were a comparable book in similar fields like computer vision, or computer translation.
