General

  • From Spark to System (Part III)

    Where Does the Bridge Get Built? This is the third essay in the From Spark to System series. Part I: “Why the Real AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet.” Part II: “The Bridge That Was Never Built.” The previous two posts in this series built a framework. The first argued that the AI revolution most people…

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  • Transactional and Relational Intelligence

    Over the years, I’ve come to see that useful AI needs more than accurate execution. It needs the ability to engage with humans over time, cope with uncertainty, and build shared understanding. This post reflects on why balancing transactional reliability with relational intelligence matters.

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  • Ten years later: is this the end of intelligent design in AI?

    I started this blog about 12 years ago, just after publishing my first book The Voice in the Machine (I will publish a second book, AI Assistant, in 2021). The initial idea of this blog was to have a venue for my musings and ruminations on conversational AI. However I haven’t posted anything for a…

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  • Hello there. A couple of months after the publication of my book, The Voice in the Machine: Building Computers that Understand Speech, I decided to start a new blog on the same theme. Having the fortune of working at ICSI, the International Computer Science Institute,  one of the few independent advanced research places where  computer speech, language, and AI…

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