Robust Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems and PC Applications provides a link between the technology and the application worlds. As speech recognition technology is now good enough for a number of applications and the core technology is well established around hidden Markov models many of the differences between systems found in the field are related to implementation variants. We distinguish between embedded systems and PC-based applications. Embedded applications are usually cost sensitive and require very simple and optimized methods to be viable. Robust Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems and PC Applications reviews the problems of robust speech recognition, summarizes the current state of the art of robust speech recognition while providing some perspectives, and goes over the complementary technologies that are necessary to build an application, such as dialog and user interface technologies. Robust Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems and PC Applications is divided into five chapters. The first one reviews the main difficulties encountered in automatic speech recognition when the type of communication is unknown. The second chapter focuses on environment-independent/adaptive speech recognition approaches and on the mainstream methods applicable to noise robust speech recognition. The third chapter discusses several critical technologies that contribute to making an application usable. It also provides some design recommendations on how to design prompts, generate user feedback and develop speech user interfaces. The fourth chapter reviews several techniques that are particularly useful for embedded systems or to decrease computational complexity. It also presents some case studies for embedded applications and PC-based systems. Finally, the fifth chapter provides a future outlook for robust speech recognition, emphasizing the areas that the author sees as the most promising for the future. Robust Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems and PC Applications serves as a valuable reference and although not intended as a formal University textbook, contains some material that can be used for a course at the graduate or undergraduate level. It is a good complement for the book entitled Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition: Fundamentals and Applications co-authored by the same author.

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?