[April 10, 2012]

The Voice in the Machine, Authored by ICSI Director Roberto Pieraccini, Now Available from MIT Press

The Voice in the Machine, the latest book by International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) Director Roberto Pieraccini, is now available from MIT (News - Alert) Press. The book examines the evolution of human-computer speech interaction capabilities over the past six decades.

"The Voice in the Machine is a fascinating look at how speech recognition technology has developed from its early beginnings to today's widespread deployment in voice-based automated services. It comes at an extraordinary time when awareness of speech recognition technology is growing in the consumer consciousness and when questions are starting to be asked about how far we can go in talking to machines," said Steve Young, Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The book, written for the non-specialist, explores how the technology of computers that understand speech has evolved from early attempts in the 1930s and 1950s to today's sophisticated statistical and mathematical models. It describes how development in speech technology has affected the ways people interact with computers and chronicles the birth and growth of the industries that have arisen around computer speech. It also provides a visin of how "talking machines" will evolve in the future.

Pieraccini, who has worked in the speech industry for more than 30 years, became the director of ICSI in January 2012. He is actively involved in numerous industry associations and serves on the editorial boards for several science and technology magazines. He is the co-author of Perception in Multimodal Dialogue Systems, published by Springer in 2008, and has contributed to multiple academic articles and research books on speech technology.

For more information on The Voice in the Machine, please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262016858

About ICSI

The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is a leading center for research in computer science and one of the few independent, nonprofit research institutes in the United States. With its unique focus on international collaboration and its affiliation with the University of California at Berkeley, ICSI brings together the most influential U.S. scientists and experts from around the world in areas such as computer networking and security, speech and language processing, algorithms, bioinformatics, computer architecture, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. For more information go to http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/, check us out on Facebook (News - Alert) at ICSIatBerkeley or follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @ICSIatBerkeley

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