The idea of being able to hold a conversation with a computer has fascinated people for a long time and has featured in many science fiction books and movies. With recent advances in spoken language technology, artificial intelligence, and conversational interface design, coupled with the emergence of smart devices, it is now possible to use voice to perform many tasks on a device - for example, sending a text message, updating the calendar, or setting an alarm. Often these tasks would require multiple steps to complete using touch, scrolling and text input but they can now be achieved with a single spoken command. Indeed voice input is often the most appropriate mode of interaction, especially on small devices where the physical limitations of the real estate of the device make typing and tapping more difficult.
The topic of this book is the conversational interface. Conversational interfaces enable people to interact with smart devices using spoken language in a natural way – just like engaging in a conversation with a person. The book provides an introduction and reference source for students and developers who wish to understand this rapidly emerging field and to implement practical and useful applications. The book aims at a middle ground between reviews and blogs in online technology magazines on the one hand and, on the other, technical books, journal articles and conference presentations intended for specialists in the field. Currently there is no comparable book that brings together information on conversational interfaces comprehensively and in a readable style.
The Conversational Interface: Talking to Smart Devices
Michael McTear, Zoraida Callejas, David Griol
Springer, 2016
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-32967-3
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-32965-9
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319329659
The code
In several chapters we provide tutorials showing how to develop examples and apps that illustrate different kinds of conversational interface at different levels of complexity. The code has been organized by chapters:
Chapter 6: Implementing speech input and output
- Web SAPI (Weg). These examples show how to use the Web Speech API to pro-vide spoken input and output on web pages (you can try it using Google Chrome).
- SimpleTTS, RichTTS, SimpleASR, RichASR, TalkBack (Android smartphone). These apps show with increasing complexity how to build Android apps with speech output and input
Chapter 7: Creating a conversational interface using chatbot technology
- TalkBot (Android smartphone). Shows how to build an Android app that connects to a chatbot in the Pandorabots web service.
- AIML (Web). Contains the AIML code that can be used to build a chatbot in Pandorabots.
Chapter 9: Implementing spoken language understanding
- Understand (Android smartphone): Shows the use of the Api.ai platform to extract semantic represen-tations from the user's spoken utterances.
Chapter 11: Implementing dialog management
- PizzaVXML (Web): Shows how to use VoiceXML build a rule-based dialog manager to manage a pizza service.
- PizzaStat (Desktop): Shows how to build a statistical dialog manager to manage a pizza service.
Chapter 16: Implementing multimodal conversational interfaces using Android Wear
- MorningCoffee (Android smartwatch), CookingNotifications (Android smartphone), WriteBack (Android smartwatch). These apps show how to build conversational interfaces for smartwatches with Android Wear, from predefined system voice actions to rich speech input processing.
Authors
Michael McTear, Zoraida Callejas and David Griol