Roberto Pieraccini (born 15 November 1955 in

Genoa, Italy Genoa ( ; it, Genova ; lij, Zêna ). is the capital of the Regions of Italy, Italian region of Liguria and the List of cities in Italy, sixth-largest city in Italy. In 2015, 594,733 people lived within the city's administrative limits. As of t ...

) is an Italian and US

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

working in the field of

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

natural language understanding Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subtopic of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an ...

, and

spoken dialog systems A spoken dialog system (SDS) is a computer system able to converse with a human with voice. It has two essential components that do not exist in a written text dialog system: a speech recognizer and a text-to-speech module (written text dialog syste ...

. He is currently Director of Engineering at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

in Zurich, Switzerland, within the

Google Assistant Google Assistant is a virtual assistant software application developed by Google that is primarily available on mobile and home automation devices. Based on artificial intelligence, Google Assistant can engage in two-way conversations, unlike t ...

organization. He has been an active contributor to speech research and technology since 1981.

Education

He obtained a degree in electrical engineering from the

University of Pisa The University of Pisa ( it, Università di Pisa, UniPi), officially founded in 1343, is one of the oldest universities in Europe. History The Origins The University of Pisa was officially founded in 1343, although various scholars place ...

in 1980 with a thesis on the equalization of data channels.

Career

After his graduation, between 1981 and 1989 he worked at

CSELT Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni (CSELT) was an Italian research center for telecommunication based in Torino, the biggest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe. It played a major role internationally especially in the stand ...

(Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni), the then Italian telephone company's research center, at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

(Murray Hill, NJ) between 1990 and 1995, and

AT&T Labs AT&T Labs is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster NJ; Middletown, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Warrenville, IL; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX; Atla ...

(Florham Park, NJ) between 1995 and 1999. In 1999 he was Director of the Natural Dialog group at SpeechWorks International until the company was acquired by

Scansoft Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its compe ...

in 2003, and then held a position of manager for the Advanced Conversational Technologies department at

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...

(

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and wit ...

, Yorktown Heights, NY) from 2003 and 2005. He served as the Chief Technology Officer at

SpeechCycle SpeechCycle was a company located in New York City that developed technology that enabled Rich Phone Applications (RPA). RPA is a category of customer interaction solutions that orchestrate and extend enterprise systems to the end customer through ...

from 2005 to 2011. Between 2012 and 2013 he was the Director of the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

. Between March 2014 and December 2017 he was at Jibo, Inc. as its Director of Advanced Conversational Technologies. He joined Google Zurich in March 2018, and Google New York in July 2022 as a Director of Engineering for the Natural Language Processing Team in the Google Assistant. He was the elected Chair of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC) between 2007 and 2008, and on the board of several international conferences and events. He was a member of the editorial boards of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and of the International Journal of Speech Technology. He was also the general co-chair of the SIGdial Conference on Dialog and Discourse, held in London in September 2009, and the general technical program chair of Interspeech 2011 held in Florence, Italy, in August 2011. During his career he authored more than 120 articles, book chapters, and conference publications in the fields of speech recognition, language modeling, optical character recognition, and dialog systems. He was elevated to the grade of Fellow of

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

in 2010 for contributions to statistical natural language understanding and spoken dialog management and learning. He is also a Fellow of ISCA, the

International Speech Communication Association The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is a non-profit organization and one of the two main professional associations for speech communication science and technology, the other association being the IEEE Signal Processing Society ...

Books

He is the author of ''The Voice in the Machine'', published by

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

in 2011, a general audience book on the history, technology, and the business of computers that understand speech. In September 2021, still with

, he published ''AI Assistants'', an accessible account of the recent evolution of virtual digital assistant like

Siri Siri ( ) is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and audioOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer questio ...

Amazon Alexa Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It was first used in the Amazon Echo smart speaker and the Echo Dot, Echo Studio and ...

, and the

Honors and awards

He is the recipient of PrimiDieci USA 2016, an award sponsored by the Italian-American Chamber of Commerce and recognizing, every year, 10 prominent Italian-Americans in fields such as science, technology, and art. On December 10, 2019 he received a Doctor in Science honorary degree from the

Heriot Watt University Heriot-Watt University ( gd, Oilthigh Heriot-Watt) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was established in 1821 as the School of Arts of Edinburgh, the world's first mechanics' institute, and subsequently granted univ ...

of Edinburgh.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pieraccini, Roberto American computer scientists Living people Fellow Members of the IEEE American chief technology officers 1955 births Italian computer scientists Speech processing researchers