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.
An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. 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?
An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. 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?
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.
Led by General Allenby, British troops entered Jerusalem in December 1917, thereby ending Ottoman rule and opening a new and important era in the history of Jerusalem. This historical moment has often been described as the beginning of a period of great change and transformation, depicting the British as the real modernisers of Jerusalem. In this study, Mazza does not offer just another history of Jerusalem. He focuses on the often neglected transition from Ottoman rule to British administration, examining the impact of the First World War and considering the socio-political changes which occurred as a result of the transition. He also considers the impact of these changes on the local population and how they, in turn, could act as agents of change in this formative period. He discusses the role of the British in Jerusalem as well as reactions to the occupation in Britain. Through the extensive use of case studies and unpublished archival material from Spain and Vatican archives, Mazza takes a fresh approach to this period of Jerusalem's history; focusing on a previously overlooked area and opening the field to new perspectives and research.
The book contains recent contributions in the field of waves propagation and stability in continuous media. In particular, the contributions consider discontinuity and shock waves, stability in fluid dynamics, small parameter problems, kinetic theories towards continuum models, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and numerical applications.The volume is the fourth in a series published by World Scientific since 1999. The following distinguished authors contribute to the present book: S Bianchini, R Caflish, C Cercignani, Y Choquet-Bruhat, C Dafermos, L Desvillettes, V Giovangigli, H Gouin, I Muller, D Parker, B Straughan, M Sugiyama and W Weiss.
This biography of Macchiavelli is widely regarded as Ridolfi’s masterpiece and is based on much material drawn from private and public archives. It presents a fresh interpretation of Macchiavelli’s career and writings and here, for example the dating of the composition of such famous works as the Prince and the Mandragola is established for the first time. This English translation, when originally published in 1963 included numerous correction and additions which brought it up to date with the most recent studies on Macchiavelli and his works.
This volume is the fifth in a series of proceedings which started in 1999. The contributions include the latest results on the theory of wave propagation, extended thermodynamics, and the stability of the solutions to partial differential equations.
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