This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Conversational AI. While the idea of interacting with a computer using voice or text goes back a long way, it is only in recent years that this idea has become a reality with the emergence of digital personal assistants, smart speakers, and chatbots. Advances in AI, particularly in deep learning, along with the availability of massive computing power and vast amounts of data, have led to a new generation of dialogue systems and conversational interfaces. Current research in Conversational AI focuses mainly on the application of machine...

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the development of dialogue systems that support robust and efficient human-machine interaction using spoken language. Spoken dialogue technology allows various interactive applications to be built and used for practical purposes, and research focuses on issues that aim to increase the system's communicative competence by including aspects of error correction, cooperation, multimodality, and adaptation in context. This book gives a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art techniques that are used to build spoken dialogue systems. It...

Acquire the knowledge needed to work effectively in conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and understand the opportunities and threats it can potentially bring. This book will help you navigate from the traditional world of dialogue systems that revolve around hard coded scripts, to the world of large language models, prompt engineering, conversational AI platforms, multi-modality, and ultimately autonomous agents.

In this new world, decisions are made by a system that may forever remain a ‘black box’ for most of us. This book aims to eliminate unnecessary noise and...