The Voice in the Machine: Building Computers That Understand Speech
"With the explosive growth in speech applications on Android, iPhone and other devices,The Voice in the Machineis 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