October 2017
Intermediate to advanced
300 pages
3h 32m
English
Content preview from Programming Voice Interfaces
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 2. Existing APIs and Libraries
Although digital voice interfaces have been around for several decades, we are really just now at the cusp of advanced voice interfaces, especially in the realm of Voice-as-a-Service (VaaS) and intelligent, near human-like voice-enabled virtual assistants. In this chapter, we will review some of the services currently available, including Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Cortana, and Google Cloud Speech API.
While there are plenty of services to choose from these days, they all offer unique functionality that you will want to consider when building out your own service or device. Some are easier than others to implement, but aren’t as flexible or customizable (yet may be sufficient for your use case). For example, Amazon Alexa might be a great choice for a virtual assistant with a lot of pre-packaged features, but if you’re looking for more straightforward speech to text, Nuance Mix or Amazon Lex may be a better option.
In addition to exploring some of the services available today, we will also touch a bit on some technical architectures, both those you might encounter as well as ones you might build while designing your own project. To start things off, let’s take a deeper look at Amazon Alexa.
Amazon Alexa
With the launch of the Amazon Echo in November 2014, Amazon helped propel home-based voice interfaces into the mainstream: using its cloud-based voice assistant “Alexa,” anyone within proximity of the device can make ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.