History
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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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Building a computer that speaks with the same naturalness and intelligibility of humans is not a much easier task than building a computer that understand speech. In fact it took decades to reach the quality of modern speech synthesizer, and yet the superiority of real human voice is still unbeatable. Still today, whenever possible, automated spoken dialog systems on the phone
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Some of you may remember the Apple’s knowledge navigator video posted here. It was released in 1987 as a vision of a future tight integration of advanced technologies on a flat tablet computer. The computer in this entertaining vision clip sports a fancy Web-like interface, a realistic avatar, touch screen with gesture recognition, teleconferencing, speech
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Can machines really think? This question has been haunting machine intelligence experts and philosopher way before today’s Siri’s speech understanding, and IBM Watson’s Jeopardy! question answering challenge. Even though today we are not thinking anymore about whether machines can think or not, the question was quite popular in the heydays of Artificial Intelligence, the cold war, and the pioneers of computer
THE VOICE IN THE MACHINE 