Speech and Conversational AI

Doors at 6:00 PM, event from 6:30-7:30.
Venue: 44 Tehama St, San Francisco, CA 94105

This meetup will be a chance to work together to think through challenges with speech assistants Siri/Alexa/Cortana/OkGoogle. In a previous discussion, we raised a number of issues, including:

• Codeswitching (between languages, dialects)
• Punctuation
• Proper nouns, especially infrequent ones or those not native to English
• Accents, individual variation
• Coping with noise
• Limited domain knowledge
• Lack of follow-up (mostly one and done), context, memory

First, we will break out into small groups exploring one of these (or other) topics. We can collect examples, identify patterns and brainstorm possible solutions. This is part of an ongoing effort to explore issues in speech and conversational AI. Then, we can do side by side comparisons of the speech assistants (Siri, Cortana...), testing how they respond to the issues raised above.

All backgrounds and levels of experience welcome to join! This is intended to be an easy-going opportunity to dive deeper into issues related to speech and conversational AI.

Joseph Tyler will be facilitating the event. He is a linguist (PhD 2012 from the University of Michigan) whose research has focused on intonation, discourse and sociolinguistics, and has published in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of English Linguistics, Discourse Processes, and Lingua. He moved to the bay area in 2016 and is interested in applications of insights about language, speech and sound. More at josephctyler.com.