Roberto Pieraccini, TellEureka
Chief Technology Officer

Roberto@TellEureka.com

This talk is about the history and the evolution of speech technology from research to a mature industry. Today, spoken language communication with computers is becoming part of everyday life. Thousands of interactive applications using spoken language technology--conversational machines--are only a phone call away, allowing millions of users each day to access information, perform transactions, and get help. Speech recognition, language understanding, text-to-speech synthesis, machine learning, and dialog management enabled this revolution after more than 50 years of research. The industry of speech matures with its evolving standards, platforms, architectures, and business models within different sectors of the market. However the general problem of human-machine communication remains largely unsolved; the research community must work with hand-in-hand with the industry to create better conversational machines.

About the speaker:

Roberto Pieraccini graduated in electrical engineering from the "Universita' degli Studi di Pisa," Pisa, Italy, in 1980. From 1981 to 1990 he was a researcher at CSELT (Torino, Italy). In June 1990 he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ) as a Member of Technical Staff, and from 1995 to 1999 he was with AT&T Shannon Laboratories (Florham Park, NJ). From November 1999 to August 2003 he was director of R&D for dialog technology at SpeechWorks International. In 2003 he joined the Human Language Technology department of IBM T.J. Watson Research in Yorktown Heights, where he managed the Conversational Interaction Technology department. In 2005 he accepted the position of Chief Technology Officer at Tell-Eureka Corporation, a company specializing in advanced technical support systems based on speech recognition technology. During his carrier he conducted research on speech recognition, language modeling, spoken dialog systems, machine learning, and authored more than 100 publications on these subjects.