Hey Cyba : The Inner Workings of a Virtual Personal Assistant

To understand the future of artificial intelligence, you need to understand how it works. Told through the eyes of a fictitious virtual assistant called Cyba, this book reveals in depth how AI works and provides insight into the extent to which we can trust it both now and in the future.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially neural network and deep learning technology, have led to rapidly improving performance in voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. Over the next few years, capability will continue to improve and become increasingly personalised. Today''s voice assistants will evolve into virtual personal assistants firmly embedded within our everyday lives. Told through the view of a fictitious personal assistant called Cyba, this book provides an accessible but detailed overview of how a conversational voice assistant works, especially how it understands spoken language, manages conversations, answers questions and generates responses. Cyba explains through examples and diagrams the neural network technology underlying speech recognition and synthesis, natural language understanding, knowledge representation, conversation management, language translation and chatbot technology. Cyba also explores the implications of this rapidly evolving technology for security, privacy and bias, and gives a glimpse of future developments. Cyba''s website can be found at HeyCyba.com.