Speech Technology Books

I am a novice in the field of synthesizer music production, and this "guide" was my first attempt to gain some info about the genre. While the author covered every key facet that I had hoped for, I found the last few chapters to be rushed without enough detail to be understoond clearly. Perhaps this was an effort to keep the book to only 60 pages (index included). The complexity of the subject matter did indeed become greater near the last few chapters, but I feel there was a lack of clarity in his explanations.
The editing was very poor, and I stumbled over 3 or 4 major misprints that hindered my learning until I realized they were errors.
This is a terrific guide if you need to "brush up" on your lingo or you have forgotten the key elements of synthesis, but as a newbie I gained less than I had hoped for with this booklet.

If you ended your search on this book, I would say you can do better. I tried to read to the book taking all approaches I know, but it seems this book is not supposed to read at all. Seems like it was written not with the intention to serve but for just the sake of it.

I'm not totally hopeless though, this book can be taken as an example of what techno-mumbo-jumbo means. You can read an entire chapter or a set of chapter to a client of yours and you bet not only will he be impressed but he wont get a word of it.

I'll add though that I'm writing this review a long time after I bought the book as it was only recently that I `tried' reading it. If some of the info in the book is obsolete, you cant really hold the author responsible for that. But this review is considering that.

I just think there are better books on the subject if you want the time you spent reading to amount for something.

I bought the '92 copyright, and if that book is indicative of the quality of this one, spend your money elsewhere.

It's like, if I want to setup a Dialogic CT system, I'll just ask the manuf for the manual.

Quite possibly the only book I've seen that conveys absolutely no redeeming information to the reader. I've also never seen a book in this price range use text as the method for constructing illustrations.

PC Telephony is the "manual" of Parity Software's VOS program and is targeted at novice PC telephony programmers. The book describe briefly several Dialogic boards that and the way VOS override C Programming. The book is interesting for those wishing to test or adopt Parity's VOS for programming their Dialogic Boards... BUT recently Parity released its new version of VOS. Spend your money on another book !

Edgar strikes again. If this guy would spend as much time doing his research as he does in self-promotion, this book would be great. Unfortunately, for whatever reason (most likely personality defect) the hype is the thing.

Besides this book having no redeming value, VOS or ADE or whatever his ... software is called is nearly useless in its own right.

How does the saying go, "the bigger the lie, the more people believe it." Edgar thinks if he can tell you how many books he's published on all different aspects of telephony you'll respect his genius. Actually he sinks lower with each lousy book. Though how he could go lower than this one, I don't know. Buy his next piece of trash book to find out.

goo

I am not new to VoIP, and I know it fairly well already (attend the standards bodies, etc.), but I needed to find a good book for other employees. This was not it. Uyless left many errors, many open topics, and frankly the book is not really about Voice over IP in detail. There are much better books out there: Olivier Hersent's "IP Telephony" and Duskalis's "IP Telephony" are much more thorough on VoIP (despite their titles), although they are somewhat out of date already. (anything over 6 months old will be)

The typographical errors in this book make it useless. I had some knowledge of this subject prior to reading it. The parts I was familiar with were so full of errors, that I could not trust any of the rest of it. Based on the price I paid, I think the publisher should pay me to send back the corrections! I am sure there is some useful stuff in here, but weeding through the junk is not worth it. In the section on MGCP, the acronym "MGCP" is spelled at least 3 different ways. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS ONE!

I have implemented several voice over IP systems, and I find Uyless' book to be an excellent technical reference. It covers much of the technical information that vendor documentation leaves out and is more readable than an ITU Spec. The call flow information is useful, and the ASN.1 references are the first that I have seen. This is not for a beginner but provides nice insight.

I was truly impressed by this title and frankly can't agree with some of the other critics. In actuality, they helped me buy this book because Voice Over IP by Ulyess Black is exactly what I have been looking for. After all, we are talking about Voice Over IP. While it does touch other areas, I really liked this book because it also covered other key areas of networking... things I must understand or reinforce before I need to learn Voice Over IP. And he does this quite well. Did he teach me something I already knew? Yes, but some of it I had forgotten! Did he teach me something I didn't know? Definitely! And this book allows me to walk away with a better understanding of Voice Over IP. I'd click on the TOC in the left hand column. I think you'll agree. While I don't know Mr. Black, he's sure taught me a lot. And thanks to Prentice Hall for such a great book!

I have mixed feelings about this book. There is a lot of good information, but it is full of typographical errors that left me feeling like I was reading a rough draft. I'm a graduate student and I bought this book looking for a good tutorial on VOIP. After reading the reviews and seeing the table of contents, this looked like the right book for me. I agree with some of the other reviews that certain areas were covered to briefly. However, the author does a good job of trying to bring together all the pieces of VOIP. The meat of the book is in the later chapters on H.323, MGCP and SS7. I would have been satified with this book were it not for the NUMEROUS errors. Examples are "next work" instead of "network," "trucking" instead of "trunking", paragraphs repeated on the same page, references to incorrect figures, incorrectly labeled figures, mis-spelled acronyms etc. I kept trying to overlook these mistakes while reading the book, but there were so many that I coudn't. The book has many good tables and specifications, but the quantity of errors throughout made me question the accuracy of these too.

Bottom Line: Wait for the second edition. This book coud be really good, but it wasn't ready to be printed yet.

While the book offers some interesting info on the physical media, it covers primarily a couple software packages that the author doesn't even seem to think are really great. It really doesn't present anything that you won't get with the instruction manuals with the hardware/software you buy for burning a CD or DVD. It's "worth less than nothing" because it costs time and postage to return the book.

Is a great book! Better than the 2nd edition. Was VERY helpful and easy to understand. I recomend it to anyone intersteted in burning your own cd's and dvd's. A great way to save your home videos.

There is little, if any, information in this book that can't be found in the results from one simple Google search! Don't waste your money on this toilet paper, unless you really are an idiot!

I feel it's a good book for someone wanting to get started in surround sound, but doesn't want to wade through the technical jargon found in the only two other industry books.
It's definitely simple, but has a lot of illustrations that are helpful in getting a room set up. If you're building a high $$ surround room, this isn't the right book. If you're using a creative lab system or something similar, this is the right book.

This is like a kids manual. The print is huge! How many books have only 2-3 sentences per page with a terrible illustration? No exageration. Doesn't go into any detail, whatsoever. Skip it. A 5 minute web search is better, AND will give you much more information.

Sufferers of Tinnitus be alarmed.
This book will not add anything to your knowledge about tinnitus.
Just like the title says, it is a self-management guide to help you cope with anything that might be bothering you. It could very well have been (and this book would apply to) any other situation affecting your lives and not necessarily tinnitus.

As I have a slight issue with tinnitus (ringing in the ears), I picked up this book from the library: Tinnitus - A Self-Management Guide For The Ringing In Your Ears by Jane L. Henry and Peter H. Wilson. I'm not quite sure that this book would be helpful to what I see as the target audience.

Chapter List: It's Time to Take Control!; Some Facts about Tinnitus; Assessing Your Tinnitus: How Does It Affect You?; The Connection between Thoughts and Emotions; Changing the Way You Think about Tinnitus; Relaxation and Stress-Management Techniques; Attention Control Techniques; Becoming Your Own Coach; Dealing with High-Risk Situations; Reducing the Impact of Tinnitus on Your Daily Lifestyle; Maintaining Gaines in the Longer-Term; Some Final Tips on Managing Your Tinnitus; Additional Reading; Appendix; Index

Tinnitus, for those who don't know, is the condition where you have a constant noise in your ear(s), like a ringing or buzzing. It's thought to be due to damage in the inner ear, but it's not something that can be easily corrected in many situations. And since the sound tends to always be there at some level, it can be an annoyance (or worse). The authors in this book do a high-level overview of what tinnitus is, what the causes are, and then go into cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques on how you can learn to live with the condition and manage your response to it. The program they outline is pretty detailed and involved, and involves a lot of writing and answering of questions to discover your current ways of coping.

I mentioned earlier I didn't think the book was too helpful. The examples and situations they feature in the book all tend to be towards the extreme end of the scale, such that the person is unable to function normally with the condition. In my case, I've had a very minor case for a long time (too much loud music growing up), and it's gotten a little worse with my dysthymia medication. Still, I wouldn't trade the benefits of the fluoxetine for reduction of the noise. For the extreme examples in the book, these people are at wits end and can't concentrate or deal with life. In that state, I don't see them taking the time and effort to work through this program on their own. With an external coach or mentor guiding them, it may be useful. But history shows that most people can't pull off a self-guided improvement program of any type on their own. Throw in a debilitating condition on top of it, and I think the chances of success drop to low single digits.

This has some very helpful cards to take along with you for ready refrence. I also love the retractable earbuds, they are great.

This is completely worthless "MINI BOOK".

It is not the REAL - FULLY DETAILED "IPOD - iTUNES FOR DUMMIES"

So if you don't read carefully - you will buy the needless piece of trash thinking you will be getting the "Real Deal".

Complete waste of money - gives you basic info that you can figure out inherently on your own.

The ad for this led one to believe that this was a full sized book, however when I received it, it was about 2"x 2". Absolutely ridiculous, not to mention the fact that this problem STILL hasn't been rectified, and I STILL hae not received credit for my return. Total rip-off, no other explanation for it.

I am very upset when i received the product, I thought it was a joke, I wish you would have listed the real dimention of the so call paperback, to me you should listed as booklet with it's dimention. I certainly did not get what I thought I bought. Faulty description!

To understand most of the book, you need expert skills in telephony, electronic, signal processing, and ITU-T specifications.
It is intented mostly to researchers (Jean-Pierre PETIT works at FranceTelecom R&D).

Any time you can pick up a used copy of a recently published technical book on an interesting topic at one-fourth of the retail price, you know there must be a problem. You would be right. This book tries to do three things at the same time and fails with at least two of its goals. It tries to talk about the business issues of biometrics, technical issues of specific biometric technologies (face recognition, speech recogniton, etc.), and finally machine learning techniques used to accomplish the biometric measurements. Only at this last goal do I think the book comes close to success, and even then only on a sketchy high level. The first seven chapters do an OK job of explaining machine learning techniques and give you some very instructive figures that are often lacking in academic textbooks, especially on neural networks. Also, these chapters do a pretty good job of explaining the equations involved. What's lacking, though, even in these early chapters, are some simple numerical examples or algorithmic steps that would give you some guidance on how to approach a task. When the book tries to make the leap to connecting the machine learning techniques to biometric authentication in a meaningful way such that a computer scientist could code up an algorithm, the book really falls on its face. There are some nice block diagrams of biometric systems, but no real details on algorithmic steps that would allow you to realize any of those blocks. Instead, there is quite a bit of verbage on the competition involved on building particular kinds of systems, and some rhetoric on possible pitfalls in specific biometric designs. However, with you standing there not knowing where to start with your design, this advice is really not very helpful.

I would say pass on this book and if you need to learn machine learning techniques, start with the older book by Mitchell entitled "Machine Learning". It talks about all of the machine learning techniques mentioned in this book, plus there are plenty of examples. Used copies are still relatively inexpensive, and its content is accessible and complete. As for biometric techniques, I've found the best books concentrate on one technique, such as fingerprint verification, and don't stray into other forms of authentication. The following is the table of contents:

Chapter 1. Overview
Chapter 2. Biometric Authentication Systems
Chapter 3. Expectation-Maximization Theory
Chapter 4. Support Vector Machines
Chapter 5. Multi-Layer Neural Networks
Chapter 6. Modular and Hierarchical Networks
Chapter 7. Decision-Based Neural Networks
Chapter 8. Biometric Authentication by Face Recognition
Chapter 9. Biometric Authentication by Voice Recognition
Chapter 10. Multicue Data Fusion
Appendix A: Convergence Properties of EM
Appendix B: Average Det Curves
Appendix C: Matlab Projects

The authors gathered some trends and superficial informations from the literature and put them in the form of a "book". It's not worth reading for the serious folks since there is no detail about anything. Web sites and internet addresses provided to find the source code are either disfunctional or obvious, a search session at Yahoo! is much more productive.

Very brief discussion of some aspects of speech coding. Perhaps useful for marketing or business people to learn some terminology; but definitely not sophisticated enough for the technical crowd. The authors include topic like psychoacoustic, which is clearly not a dominant part of today's speech coding techniques, but yet make a whole chapter about it, waste of space and time...