Roberto Pieraccini

Since March 2018 I am a director of engineering at Google in Zurich, Switzerland.

I have been in the speech technology research and business for more than 30 years. Prior to joining Google, I led a team that build the conversational capability of Jibo, a startup aiming at the commercialization of the first consumer social robot. In 2012 I was the director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, CA, an independent research institution affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley. Before that I was the Chief Technology Officer of SpeechCycle, a company specialized in advanced spoken human-machine interaction systems for enterprise customer care (yes, those annoying "please tell me the reason you are calling about" computers that prevent you to talk to human operators when you need them). Trying to make those annoying computers better, I led an effort to develop new technology that tried to make those computers learn from their own mistakes and improve the quality of the interactions with customers.

Before SpeechCycle, between 2003 and 2005, I managed a speech research team at IBM T.J. Watson Research, in Yorktown Heights, NY, and prior to that, between 1999 and 2003, I was at SpeechWorks International, which is now known as Nuance, today's largest worldwide computer speech company.

The turning point in my computer speech research career was when, in 1988, I joined AT&T Bell Laboratories (later known as AT&T Laboratories). There I worked with some of the most influential scientists in computer speech, such as Larry Rabiner and Bishnu Atal. I arrived at Bell Laboratories from Italy, where in the 1980s I was a researcher at CSELT, the laboratories of the national Italian telephone company.

During all this time I wrote, as an author or co-author, about 150 scientific papers and articles in the fields of speech recognition, spoken language understanding and dialog, multimodal interaction, and machine learning. I am best known for my original contributions to statistical methods for spoken language understanding and reinforcement learning for spoken dialog systems.

My first book, "The Voice in the Machine", published by MIT Press in 2012, narrates the story of 60 years of computer speech technology evolution in a way that is accessible to general scientific readers. My second book, "AI Assistants", published by MIT Press in 2021, still for a general audience of readers, looks at the recent development of human-machine voice interaction after Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant were introduced and new technologies, such as Deep learning, dramatically changed the way computers recognize and understand human speech.