Michael F. McTear

Michael McTear is Emeritus Professor at the University of Ulster with a special research interest in spoken language technologies. He graduated in German Language and Literature from Queens University Belfast in 1965, was awarded MA in Linguistics at University of Essex in 1975, and a PhD at the University of Ulster in 1981. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii (1986-87), the University of Koblenz, Germany (1994-95), and University of Granada, Spain (2006- 2010). He has been researching in the field of spoken dialogue systems for more than fifteen years and is the author of the widely used textbook Spoken dialogue technology: toward the conversational user interface (Springer, 2004). He also is a co-author (with Kristiina Jokinen) of the book Spoken Dialogue Systems, (Morgan and Claypool, 2010), and (with Zoraida Callejas) of the book Voice Application Development for Android (Packt Publishing,2013).

Zoraida Callejas is Associate Professor at the University of Granada, Spain, and member of the CITIC-UGR Research Institute. She graduated in Computer Science in 2005, and was awarded a PhD in 2008, also at the University of Granada. Her research is focused on dialogue systems, especially on affective human-machine conversational interaction, and she has made more than 160 contributions to books, journals and conferences. She has participated in several research projects related to these topics and contributes to scientific committees and societies in the area. She has been Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic (2007-13), University of Trento, Italy (2008), University of Ulster, Northern Ireland (2009), Technical University of Berlin, Germany (2010), University of Ulm, Germany (2012, 2014) and ParisTech, France (2013). She is co-author (with Michael McTear) of the book Voice Application Development for Android (Packt Publishing, 2013).

Presents a comprehensive overview of the various technologies that underlie conversational user interfaces

Combines descriptions of the technologies with a guide to various toolkits and software that enable readers to implement and test their own solutions

Provides a series of worked examples so readers can develop and implement different aspects of the technologies

Includes supplementary material: [...]

Introduction.- Part 1: Conversational Interfaces: Preliminaries.- The Dawn of the Conversational Interface.- Towards a Technology of Conversation.- Conversational Interfaces: Past and Present.- Part 2: Developing a Speech-Based Conversational Interface.- Speech Input and Output.- Implementing Speech Input and Output.- Creating a Conversational Interface using Chatbot Technology.- Spoken Language Understanding.- Implementing Spoken Language Understanding.- Dialog Management.- Implementing Dialog Management.- Response Generation.- Part 3: Conversational Interfaces and Devices.- Conversational Interfaces: Devices, Wearables, Virtual Agents, and Robots.- Emotion, Affect, and Personality.- Affective Conversational Interfaces.- Implementing Multimodal Conversational Interfaces Using Android Wear.- Part 4: Evaluation and Future Directions.- Evaluation.- Future Directions.