Hey Cyba The Inner Workings of a Virtual Personal Assistant

Recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially neural network and deep learning technology, have led to rapidly improving performance in voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. Over the next few years, capability will continue to improve and become increasingly personalised. Today's voice assistants will evolve into virtual personal assistants firmly embedded within our everyday lives. Told through the view of a fictitious personal assistant called Cyba, this book provides an accessible but detailed overview of how a conversational voice assistant works, especially how it understands spoken language, manages conversations, answers questions and generates responses. Cyba explains through examples and diagrams the neural network technology underlying speech recognition and synthesis, natural language understanding, knowledge representation, conversation management, language translation and chatbot technology. Cyba also explores the implications of this rapidly evolving technology for security, privacy and bias, and gives a glimpse of future developments. Cyba's website can be found at HeyCyba.com.

1. May I introduce myself?; 2. My inner workings; 3. How my brain works; 4. Knowing what I know; 5. What did you say?; 6. What does that mean?; 7. What should I say next?; 8. Listen to me; 9. How do you say that in…?; 10. Let's chat; 11. Can you trust me?; 12. When all is quiet; 13. Future upgrades and beyond; Glossary; Notes; Index.

Steve Young has more than 40 years of research experience in speech processing and AI. He founded a number of speech technology startups including Entropic acquired by Microsoft in 1999 and VocalIQ acquired by Apple in 2015, following which he worked in the Apple Siri Development team. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the IET and the IEEE. He holds an IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, a European Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award and the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.