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Summary: The "Strunk and White" for Speech Recognition
Review: Author, Bruce Balentine's goal with How to Build a Speech Recognition Application is to produce the Strunk and White of speech recognition. An electronic musician and composer, Balentine was a pioneer in the speech recognition field. The text's examination of the problems of navigation from human perception to machine recognition give comprehension to even the layman. The book is well organized and structured with the +,/,- system which allows a novice to follow. According to linguist, Dr. John White, the first chapter could stand alone as a treatise on the dynamics of the human speech interface with the machine.
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Summary: A must-have book for speech application developers
Review: Developing speech applications is not easy to master. Even with VoiceXML becoming more widely adopted, there are a lot of intricacies that that a developer must understand. This book will provide you with a solid foundation to become an effective speech application developer. The book did very well in presenting the limitations of the current speech recognition technology (dialog design, large vocabularies, promtp design, etc.) and made suggestions on how to overcome such problems in specific situations.
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Summary: A must-have book for speech application developers
Review: Developing speech applications is not easy to master. Even with VoiceXML becoming more widely adopted, there are a lot of intricacies that that a developer must understand. This book will provide you with a solid foundation to become an effective speech application developer. The book did very well in presenting the limitations of the current speech recognition technology (dialog design, large vocabularies, promtp design, etc.) and made suggestions on how to overcome such problems in specific situations.
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Summary: An excellent educational and "how-to" guide for ASR design.
Review: I have spent 15 years working with ASR and Text-to-Speech technologies from the perspective of an application designer and system implementer- this is the first book that has provided a complete "education" on the "how to use these technology advances with the greatest chance of actual user acceptance and assistance in doing it right the first time out". This book is a primer for first time technology interest, and a must-have for those technical types who implement automation systems on an on-going basis.
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Summary: A definitive resource for telephony professionals
Review: Large vocabulary recognition applications are hot. Callers can speak directly to computers to make reservations, trade stocks, track packages, and handle many other complex transactions. Convenient applications that allow you to use the telephone to interact with computerized tranaction systems will soon be ubiquitous. Designers with the experience and cleverness to engineer good applications are in demand. This book provides an excellent guide for both the novice and experienced application designer. Balentine and Morgan are both well known and well respected in the User Interface and Speech Processing technical communities. The book covers a wide variety of topics useful in creating speech recognition applications: speech output, speech recognition, natural language understanding, vocabulary suggestions, testing, etc. All of the topics are covered from an intensely practical approach. The authors provide lots of guidelines for application dialog definition, and distinguish required from recommended practices. They make an effort to point out good design practices. A careful reader of this book can not help but become a better dialog designer and application developer. But this book is not just a cookbook, or a list of guidelines. Balentine and Morgan make sure the reader understands why a recommendation is made. In difficult or controversial areas, they discuss important issues that affect the application dialog. For example, in the chapter on barge-in they avoid the simple minded approach used by some technology vendors and discuss when barge-in should and should not be used, how to recover from error, and the legal issues posed.
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Summary: An excellent, highly practical book.
Review: Large vocabulary recognition applications are hot. Callers can speak directly to computers to make reservations, trade stocks, track packages, and handle many other complex transactions. Convenient applications that allow you to use the telephone to interact with computerized tranaction systems will soon be ubiquitous. Designers with the experience and cleverness to engineer good applications are in demand. This book provides an excellent guide for both the novice and experienced application designer. Balentine and Morgan are both well known and well respected in the User Interface and Speech Processing technical communities. The book covers a wide variety of topics useful in creating speech recognition applications: speech output, speech recognition, natural language understanding, vocabulary suggestions, testing, etc. All of the topics are covered from an intensely practical approach. The authors provide lots of guidelines for application dialog definition, and distinguish required from recommended practices. They make an effort to point out good design practices. A careful reader of this book can not help but become a better dialog designer and application developer. But this book is not just a cookbook, or a list of guidelines. Balentine and Morgan make sure the reader understands why a recommendation is made. In difficult or controversial areas, they discuss important issues that affect the application dialog. For example, in the chapter on barge-in they avoid the simple minded approach used by some technology vendors and discuss when barge-in should and should not be used, how to recover from error, and the legal issues posed.
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Summary: A definitive resource for telephony professionals
Review: This book is a definitive resource for any professional seeking to design a clean, usable and rock-solid telephony interface. In fact, the book takes you beyond speech recognition per se and helps you to understand the logic and heuristics of good telephone interface design. I highly recommend this text for anyone who is putting together a new system or has to re-do an existing one.
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Summary: Essential reading for dialogue designers
Review: This book is simply the best for your bookcase if you are a voice dialogue designer. I would strongly recommend it to novice and expert alike, especially for those learning VoiceXML for the first time, or working with it day to day. Grounded in hours of human-computer experiments, and a multi-disciplinary approach to user interface design - this book is a rare combination of a careful ear for human language and dialogue, extensive engineering experience, and pragmatic knowledge of the strengths and limitations of current voice recognition technology. The second edition has brought it bang up-to-date. It cuts through the hype that has always surrounded each successive generation of voice technology - focussing always on the building of robust useable interfaces which work with the user rather than against them.
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Summary: Essential reading for dialogue designers
Review: This book is simply the best for your bookcase if you are a voice dialogue designer. I would strongly recommend it to novice and expert alike, especially for those learning VoiceXML for the first time, or working with it day to day. Grounded in hours of human-computer experiments, and a multi-disciplinary approach to user interface design - this book is a rare combination of a careful ear for human language and dialogue, extensive engineering experience, and pragmatic knowledge of the strengths and limitations of current voice recognition technology. The second edition has brought it bang up-to-date. It cuts through the hype that has always surrounded each successive generation of voice technology - focussing always on the building of robust useable interfaces which work with the user rather than against them.
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Summary: Thoughts on the second edition
Review: This book is so well organized and articulated it's bound to be of value to anyone doing ASR application development. My own experience in voice response runs from end-user representative to application designer and I found every chapter enlightening. In this second edition of Bruce and David's ASR style guide, I believe the end users will find the new sections on voice portals and managing your voice talent of particular interest. And all users should take particular note of the expanded discussions of usability testing and performance reporting. I found the first version of How to Build a Speech Recognition Application so useful that I actually took the time to compared the new edition, page for page, with the original. That was a relatively easy task, because the authors retained the original section numbering wherever possible. My comparison showed that the original guidelines have been substantially updated, based on continuing research and the hands-on experiences of both the authors and other acknowledged experts. In addition, I believe the new sections and expanded discussions of critical design considerations are going to prove valuable to both novice and seasoned developers. In short, developing effective telephony dialogues is a complex, rapidly evolving and downright expensive task. Given that reality, every development team ought to have at least one copy of this landmark style guide.
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