The Voice in the Machine: Building Computers That Understand Speech (Hardcover)

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?

斯坦利·库布里克（Stanley Kubrick）於1968年的電影《2001太空漫遊》（2001: A Space Odyssey）中，著名地出現了HAL，一台能夠與太空旅行者進行長時間對話的電腦。四十多年後的今天，我們擁有了庫布里克從未想像過的先進電腦技術，但我們並沒有像HAL那樣能夠說話並理解語音的電腦。這是我們技術的失敗嗎？我們是否還沒有深入理解人類語言和語音的某些基本要素，以便能夠在電腦中複製它們？在《機器中的聲音》（The Voice in the Machine）中，羅伯托·皮埃拉奇尼（Roberto Pieraccini）研究了六十年來在科學和技術領域中開發能夠使用語音與人類互動的電腦以及圍繞這些技術的產業。他指出，雖然如今能夠理解語音的電腦可能沒有HAL那樣進行對話的能力，但它們具有使它們在眾多應用中可用的功能，並且正在快速改進和創新的軌道上。皮埃拉奇尼描述了從波形方法到人工智能方法，再到基於嚴謹數學模型（具體而言，隱馬可夫模型）的統計學習和人類語音建模的語音識別和語音理解過程的演變。他詳細介紹了對話系統的發展、語音生成的能力以及將說話機器推向市場的過程。最後，他提出了一個只有未來才能回答的問題：我們最終會得到像HAL一樣的電腦，還是完全出乎意料的東西？