1. Teaching Machine to Listen Sol Lerner Chapter 25

2. Summary Computer programmer Sol Lerner explains the complexities of creating voice recognition systems – computerized systems that respond to spoken prompts much like a human would. Sol’s company develops these systems for businesses for customer service and for people who are not able to use keyboards. Sol introduces some fundamental concepts about communications systems, describes how a telephone works, how computer can “hear” spoke words. Getting the computer to listen, however, is a much more complex task. Machines must be taught thousands of rules governing human speech patterns in order to interpret the meaning of spoke language.

3. What reasons does Sol offer for wanting to develop speech recognition systems? A signal is the part of a communication system that carries information. A message is the information being sent over the network.

4. What parts of the telephone communications system are the encoder and the decoder? The diaphragm in the mouthpiece of the telephone is the encoder. Another diaphragm in the receiver of the phone is the decoder.

5. What is being encoded? Why is encoding necessary? The diaphragm encodes spoken words into electrical signals. Encoding is necessary to put a message into a form that can be transmitted through the system.

6. How is electricity used in the two communications systems described in this chapter?