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.
