Speech Recognition Books

Words Their Way is an excellent source for teachers to use for word study. It gives great insight into how kids learn to spell.

It's been shown that spelling provides a window to one's reading. This book explains the developmental stages children go through K- adult. The database software on one of the CDs that allows one to analyze the spelling inventories and sort the results is very easy to use. Classroom teachers appreciate the data I have been able to give them on their students. The word games and short videos on the 2nd CD are very helpful. The analytical phonics approach is very kid-friendly right up through high school. This is a very thorough resource that every ELA, SpEd, and Title I teacher should use.

The book is outstanding. The materials in the book is easy to read and follow. I use the activities and word sorts in my classroom each day. I have used the spelling inventory with my class, also.
I do have a problem with the CD that came with the book. I wish the word sorts involving words would be big like the picture sorts are. My students have trouble with the small size of squares.

This is a great resource. It gives many examples of how to impliment the program. One thing I really like about Words Their Way is the fact that is hands on. This will really help my students who are more concrete thinkers.

My children attended a public school where this program was used. When I brought them home due to their various LDs/allergies, I balked at the $40 price tag of this book and opted for the less expensive Spectrum Spelling books for their grade level. I found those to be rather annoying because often my children already knew the words. And the ones they didn't know, they would spell correctly on the tests, but they didn't necessarily continue to spell the words correctly in their writing. Mid-way through the year I abandoned the Spectrum books and purchased this one.

My favorite thing about this approach is how the kids really think about and interact with the words. It is a disciplined program, I require my kids to do a word sort and an activity in their spelling journals every day -- their choice. However, this typically takes less than 10 minutes a day.

The other thing I do is pretest the kids every week to find out which words they need to study. If they already know a spelling pattern, then I don't give it to them and move on to the next one. Sometimes I pull misspelled words out of their writing, and then find the pattern that applies and give them those words for the week.

I will say, that for most homeschoolers, this book is pretty heavy on the theory, and the "how-to" is mixed up with the theory so it may take more work up front to start the program if you are unfamiliar with the idea of spelling notebooks and word activities. But it is quite fascinating, and will give you a new appreciation for a young child's emerging spelling skills, as well as concrete strategies for helping older students with more complex words.

As for content, the book covers spelling from pre-K through at least middle school, perhaps early high school.

And the CD-Rom is a real time-saver too, with its words for sorts and activities.

All in all, quite effective, very interesting, and a great value - you buy this once and then purchase simple notebooks or composition books for their spelling journals, and you are set for years to come.

It is funny how I was glancing at the books and this book Voice XML caught my attention. I was looking for a book like this. This is a great resource for Voice XML developers like me. The book covers wide range of topics. The book is an excellent hands on guide to build voice applications with Voice XML 2.0. I liked the VUI design tips throughout the book. Great job!

This book is an excellent resource for a VoiceXML developer. It covers a wide range of topics in detail and has some excellent VUI design tips. I love the cross reference of voice technology companies and the services that they provide.

This is the best VoiceXML book I've seen. Most VoiceXML books try to do too much: talk about voice hardware, telephony, the history of voice, tts, as well as be a VoiceXML reference. The weakness of these books is that one or more of these sections reveals that the authors do not really command the knowledge needed to make these sections useful. This book also attempts to do these things, but for the most part is able to carry it off.

If you're looking for a reference, this is the book to get. The reference section is current VoiceXML 2.0 (October 2001), which is an advantage in and of itself. But the real strength of the reference section is its depth. Each element, (e.g., , , ) has an entry for syntax (how to invoke the element), a description (what the element is used for), a thorough discussion of its attributes (that is, a description of the attribute), a usage statement (the elements parents and children), and an example (a snipet of complete code that uses the element). The examples and discussion of attributes really set this book apart from its peers.

There is a brief discussion of the architecture of a VoiceXML app, and a couple of paragraphs discussing the differences between VoiceXML 1.0 and 2.0.

The book also gives, contrary to my expectations, a history of the voice industry, a history of VoiceXML, and a discussion of players in the industry. What makes this book's treatment of these topics unusual is that the authors (particularly Kunins, I suspect) actually know these fields. I don't normally want these sections in a reference book (it just adds bulk around the section I really want) but I found them quite compelling here. I learned quite a bit from reading them.

The book also contains sections on Dynamic VoiceXML, Security, Voice App Life Cycle, VUI Design, the Future of VoiceXML, and a case study. I haven't read these sections yet, so I can't comment on them. I do know, however, that the sections I have read are sufficiently superior to make this THE VoiceXML book on their own.

If I were to criticize the book, I would fault the authors' lavish praise of TellMe (this is minor and not unexpected) and the examples in the reference section. The examples are quite good for someone learning VoiceXML, and the authors are commended for including them. The fault (albeit a minor one) is that they are fairly vanilla. So, while I would have preferred more examples, I concede that such examples would make the book much larger and the inclusion of "advanced" examples to the exclusion of "canonical" examples would have made them less useful to developers learning VoiceXML.

Overall, if you are going to own one VoiceXML reference, THIS should be that one.

This is a summary of the full review available at:
http://voicexmlplanet.com/reviews/vxmlbook.html

In short, this is the VoiceXML book I wish I had written. The authors have produced a comprehensive title that includes gems that could only have originated from masters of the craft.

My only complaint is that the book is a bit too biased towards Tellme (one of the authors is an employee), but this can be forgiven based on the quality and depth of the content.

My judgement is that this book is the most well rounded in-depth book on the topic that's been published to date. I am very happy with the mix of content, summaries of important concepts such as linguistics, speech recognition, and speech synthesis, as well as the in-your-face examples and complete reference. In fact, I liked it so much that I will probably be using it as a standard reference in my company's VoiceXML training course.

I was mislead by the accompanying great reviews for this book. Having bought and read the book I find that it serves more as a reference than to illustrate how VoiceXML can be used through example applications. But I should admit though that this book does a good job of serving as a reference. I also bought "VoiceXML: 10 Projects to Voice-Enable your system" that helped me to come up to speed to do a VoiceXML project.

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.

When this book came out a couple of years ago it was the first and only book on designing speech recognition systems. It was very valuable then, but now more books are available that cover the same information and more, for a lot less money.

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.

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.

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.

I used Dragon to first-draft Writing Nonfiction: Turning Thoughts Into Books. I was so impressed with the system, I included a chapter on using speech recognition to dictate a how-to book. Then I found Dan Newman's book. I recognized a number of things I had learned and found a whole lot more. Newman made the Dragon even more fun.

If you write a lot and are not an accurate, rapid typist, get speech recognition software. If you are fast and correct, keep on keyboarding. Dragon is good but you will have to make corrections. If you already make mistakes, it does not matter if you talk or type.

Dan Newman takes you step-by-step through using Dragon Naturally Speaking. (For coverage, click on Table of Contents in the left-hand column of this page.) He even includes trouble-shooting tips and resources.

Dan Newman is a great writer, gifted computer expert and a dedicated teacher.

As the author of 113 books (including revisions and foreign-language editions) and over 500 magazine articles, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has to write a lot. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

Why didn't someone write this book years ago? Dan Newman distills the complexities into concise explanations of perfect clarity. Dragonites need this book. All the problems I've been struggling with for years were solved in a few hours of reading. Talk about clear, easy organization. Thank you, Dan Newman!

This book not only covers Dragon NaturallySpeaking software but also offers several tips and examples on efficient speech recognition. The material is presented in such interesting fashion that makes this book fun to read. If you own Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, this book is a must to have.

Dave Newman's book is essential for any speech recognition user regardless of the amount of experience they may have. He teaches you techniques that help you improve your accuracy and speed. He also gives you pointers on how to optimize your software and hardware for maximum accuracy and speed. Dave provides a complete step by step guide on all the features of Dragon 4.0 with greater detail. He includes the new features such as surfing the web by voice. This book is a must have for making your speech recognition program usable in terms of reducing frustration and improving the overall performance of your software with his instructions which Dragon doesn't cover in their manual.

This is a really helpful book. I would prefer to read and Dan Newman's book than all the technical stuff in the Dragon manual, because it is so much more user-friendly. I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking since it came out in 1995. There is so much to know, and so much you can forget!! By reading this book, I am remembering some very useful tips, and learning some new ones. I would recommend this book to anyone using NaturallySpeaking.

I bought this book because I wanted a comprehensive introduction on the statistical approach to speech recognition. There is no doubt that this is an excellent book, that achieves this. If you are new to the field of speech recognition, be warned that this book isn't exactly the easiest to read, though.

For example, chapter 2 which discusses Hidden Markov Models, laying part of foundation for the following chapters, is full of mathematical formulas that won't be easy to follow unless you already have some background on the topic. I would recommend that instead you read L. Rabiner's paper "A Tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and Selected Applications in Speech Recognition". Rabiner not only shows the formulas, he describes their meaning, and the tutorial makes it easy for you to follow the text and actually understand what is going on.

That said, every chapter includes a section on additional reading (the above paper is mentioned in chapter 2) so you can always look up the references to help you understand the material, if you need to.

To summarize, this is an excellent text, that I would recommend to experts in the field, but beginners may need additional reading to get a better understanding of the book.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the statistical models and algorithms used for speech recognition. Jelinek sets up the speech recognition problem in the traditional way as the decoding half of Shannon's noisy channel model. While Jelinek glosses over signal processing, he provides an excellent overview of the symbolic stages of processing involved in speech recognition.

After a quick introduction, Jelinek digs into the statistics behind Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), the foundation of almost all of today's speech recognizers. This is followed by chapters devoted to acoustic modeling (probability of acoustics given words) and language modeling (probability of a given sequence of words), and the algorithmic search induced by this model. There are also advanced chapters on fast match (widely used heuristics for pruning search), the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for training, and the use of decision trees, maximum entropy and backoff for language models. He covers several auxiliary topics including information theory and perplexity, the spelling to phoneme mapping, and the use of triphones for cross-phoneme modeling. Each chapter is a worthy introduction to an important topic.

This book does not presuppose much in the way of mathematical, computational, or linguistic background. A simple intro to probability and some experience with search problems would be of help, but isn't necessary -- you'll learn a lot about these topics reading the book.

All in all, this is the best thorough introduction to speech recognition that you can find. Read it along with Manning and Schuetze's "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing" from the same series; there's a little overlap in language modeling, but not much. You might want to start with the gentler book by Jurafsky and Martin, "Speech and Language Processing", before tackling either Jelinek or Manning and Schuetze.

This is an excellent book for people with speech recognition knowledge. The algorithms are very well described in a sound and comprehensive mathematical framework.

This book provides an excellent overview of speech recognition technology using Hidden Markov Models. Although Jelinek is clearly speaking with respect to his experience at IBM - he might as well be describing any other commercial speech recognition framework in the world. As a researcher and programmer in the area of speech recognition I regard this book as an excellent reference. It is concise, and I would say that anyone with a reasonable grasp of mathematics should have no trouble understanding most of the topics. In some of the more advanced areas some readers might need to refer to one of reference papers described in the book. I agree with the first reader - destined to be a classic!

This book is possibly the first of its kind - exclusively devoted to Statistical Speech Recognition. The author is a pioneer in the area - one of the 'fathers' of the field,as it were. Thus one expects the text to be authoritative, and it is. The 'information density' is very high - it's a small book, but absolutely packed with information. You'll learn a lot about Hidden Markov Models and their use in Speech Recognition, but it also addresses many other issues, like language modelling and grammar, making it much more than a mere 'speech maths' book.

However, this is definitely not meant for absolute newcomers to the field of speech processing, and it does assume some background in advaced mathematics as well, especially in probability.

If you're looking for other aspects of Speech Recognition or code, you've come to the wrong place - but please don't spoil the rating of an excellent book by complaining that it doesn't have what it never promised to :-) - if you want a solid introduction to the field as a whole, i'd suggest 'Fundamentals of Speech Recognition' by Rabiner & Juang, and if it's code that you're looking for, there's lots of excellent open source stuff available on the net, notably from CMU and Cambridge, and there are some recent books in the market exclusively devoted to implementation of speech recognition systems.

To sum up, if you have some exposure to speech recognition and want to learn the maths & concepts behind the Statistical approach to Speech Recognition, this is your book.

This book covers all the protocols and schemes for delivering voice and data over IP, frame relay, and ATM. The author has an easy-to-follow writing style that makes the book a joy to read.

This book really brings together every aspect of converged network architecture in one place. From voice communication networks to data networks to voice packet processing to a softswitch model for IP, this book has it all.

If you read Ibe's ATM book and like it get ready because you are going to LOVE this book even more. Dr.IBE knows his staff.

If you are a technical person this book will became your bible. If you are not a technical person this book will make you feel as if you were technical but most important will help you understand the subject in not time. (SALES, Managers, QA... Guys take note).

I do not know how he does it but a difficult subjects become clear after he explains them. I been following his writing and I must say that there is no one in my opinion who can explain complicated subjects the way he does. Check his ATM book and you will understand what I mean.

WELL DONE IBE...

This is a great book that goes beyond VoIP. It covers all major network architectures, and the latest enabling protocols like SIP, H.323, MPLS, and H.248. I found the discussions of Voice packet processing and Access schemes particularly helpful.

Reading the few introductory chapters, I discovered that this is an easy-to-read book that covers an interesting and evolving area of research. It provides the reader with a "jump- start" to the area of speech coding. Detailed explanations, with a large number of schematics and illustrating diagrams, furnish a vehicle for a fast learning curve.
Nevertheless, the quality of some of these schematics and diagrams need to be revised in future editions. Furthermore, there are some missing notations with some of the curves discussed; such as in Figure 1.14. I would be happy to see the word (Absolute Threshold in dB) on the vertical axis and the (Frequency in Hz) on the horizontal axis instead of AT (f), f.
In spite of these anomalies, I found the book to be deserving of esteem and respect. For me, the most interesting chapters were those covering linear prediction, PCM, algebraic CELP and speech quality assessment.

This books serves as an excellent bridge between speech coding standards and speech coding research publications. It does not seek to cover every existing topic in speech coding, but presents analysis and background of some of the most successful speech coding standards. Many "whys" that come to mind reading those standards are addressed. Carefully compliled illustrations accompany almost every important concept presented. This makes cover-to-cover reading of this book a pleasure.

This is a very good book on speech coding, especially focus on CELP coders. Many kinds of CELP coders are introduced in detail. If you are beginner on speech coding, this book is for you. But other coders, such as MBE and WI, are not presented. So I don't think it is a comprehensive book. I give it 4 stars.

I appreciate very much the amount of figures and simulation results presented in this book; also, the pseudocodes throughout the book helps in the understanding and implementation. In addition, the exercises complement very well with the text. I highly recommend this book to those interested in speech coding.

I highly recommend this book. Very well written and the projects actually work once you work out your own knowledge of CGI and Perl, but that was not a big deal. I especially like the detailed comment on the code and the in-depth analysis of each of the VoiceXML elements and attributes. I hope Mark Miller plans to write a sequel!

I bought this book last week and implemented most of the hands-on exercises in the book. The exercises are fun to do and the author's explanations are very clear and organized that made learning VoiceXML very interesting.

Now I feel very comfortable to write a VoiceXML script for my upcoming project. No to mention some typos in the scripts that provides you even better opportunity to learn hands-on.

This book offers a great step-by-step approach. The working VoiceXML sites created in the book provide great, practical knowledge that you can put right to work. And the code-check database was very helpful in detecting where a program might have gone wrong. I would recommend this book for anyone getting started with VoiceXML.

Like the other Words their Way materials, this volume continues the wonderful tradition of combining excellent teaching ideas with the black line masters so you can use the strategies immediately. This level is especially appropriate for students learning letter/sound relationships. It gives dozens of poems and stories which have sorts to support teaching them. There are old faithfuls such as "It's raining, it's pouring" to new poems that teach phonemic awareness, rhyming, visual discrimination and sight words. My favorite is the alphabet printed in several different fonts so students can learn all the ways 'A' might look. I wish I had this 21 years ago when I started teaching. I use it daily now.

Sorts 1-5 are concept sorts, 6-11 are picture sorts for phonological awareness, 12-14 are alphabet knowledge sorts, and 15-27 are sorts for beginning consonant sounds. Assessments are included for each group of sorts. Instructions for introducing/demonstrating the sorts are given, as well as notes for the teacher, literature links for read-aloud, extension activities and my favorite - shared reading texts. I think that this is a fabulous resource and after teaching first grade for 5 years, I plan on implementing Words Their Way in my kindergarten classroom in September. I also think that this is a must have for anyone planning on implementing the program. I don't think that the WTW textbook offers the range of resources in this book.

This is a very helpful book for ESL Kindergarteners! I have all the Words Their Way books and have used them at every grade level in my elementary school.

Blade Kotelly is the one person in voice design whose attention to the human possibilities of a well-designed voice user interface provides assurance that humanizing our machines will not mechanize humanity. This treatment does not, however, merely try to convince aspiring designers to make their interfaces sound human. It illustrates how a designer can avoid ambiguity, aim for the most graceful styles of retries and error recovery, and how emotive responses can help to implicitly communicate the system's capabilities and limitations without requiring lengthy, explicit descriptions to be read out.

Though they are sometimes subtle, the issues and solutions outlined here are broadly explained, and this fosters an appreciation of each and leaves readers better equipped to anticipate where the next one may lie.

Kotelly is not delivering a text book which seeks to catalog countless dos and don'ts of design. Rather, he takes what I feel is the proper tack of showing by example how problems arise and listing not one, but a variety of choices a designer could make to avoid the problem. The result is not a series of commandments, but a richly illustrated outline of a well-developed philosophy of design and depiction. The work, I feel, helps the reader to appreciate the impulses that shaped Kotelly's leading work in the field, and to promote in him/her a sense of how they can develop their own affinity for designing systems that work efficiently and are received warmly.

If you truly think that a book will help you break into this field or expand your mastery within it, this is an excellent choice. It will inform you and prompt you to think well beyond the content it directly offers. It is perfect to get you thinking more passionately and expansively of what is possible in voice user interface design.

Speech recognition as a commercial product is still very new. In 1988, when I was first involved with it, the state of the art did not involve real time capability. You had to record the utterance and then analyse it with a computer. Typically, you also had to train the software with the speaker beforehand.

Now, we have commercially available real time, speaker independent products. Some of the largest companies, like United Airlines and ATT, have deployed these, to try and reduce call centre costs, and to improve the user's experience when dialling into such a place. Are you considering installing such software? Of course, you can talk to the vendors. But where can you get objective advice? One possibility is to ask researchers in the field. But they can easily and inadvertantly drown you in jargon, especially if you do not have a technical background. This book attempts to fill that need. You do not need a degree in computer science or maths to understand it.

The book does not explain how speech recognition works. Rather the emphasis is at a higher level: Using it in your workplace. The author gives many lucid examples of this. Basically, he outlines a commonsensical appproach that can be understood by anybody. He explains how not to overburden the user with long utterances full of information, but to take advantage of the context of the conversation to omit unnecessary details. He emphasises thorough testing, with a disciplined scaling up to a real life deployment in a call centre. Something that may well have been omitted in other deployments, leading to users gnashing their teeth in frustration at an obtuse dialog, or at busy phone lines.

He also discusses why companies should regard this as part of their corporate branding, and how to choose an appropriate "noble" voice as part of that branding. I think the "noble" sounds rather pompous, actually. But that's not his fault! It is a standard phrase in this field, and you too might get used to it.