The Voice in the Machine

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?