The Voice Inside

Seventeen-year-old Luke's older sister, Pat, has always been his moral compass, like a voice inside his head, every time he has a decision to make. So when Pat disappears on a tiny island off the coast of Honduras and the authorities claim she's drowned - despite the fact that they can't produce a body - Luke heads to Honduras to find her because he knows something the authorities don't. From the moment of her disappearance, Pat's voice has become real, guiding him to Utila, where she had accepted a summer internship to study whale sharks. Once there, he meets several characters who describe his sister as a very different girl from the one knows. Does someone have a motive for wanting her dead? Determined to get to the bottom of Pat's disappearance, Luke risks everything, including his own life, to find the answer.

In the follow-up to bestselling psychological thriller The Night Bird, a serial killer mistakenly set free becomes a city's worst nightmare--and a detective's deadliest challenge. Four years after serial killer Rudy Cutter was sent away for life, San Francisco homicide inspector Frost Easton uncovers a terrible lie: his closest friend planted false evidence to put Cutter behind bars. When he's forced to reveal the truth, his sister's killer is back on the streets. Desperate to take Cutter down again, the detective finds a new ally in Eden Shay. She wrote a book about Cutter and knows more about him than anyone. And she's terrified. Because for four years, Cutter has been nursing revenge day after stolen day. Staying ahead of the game of a killer who's determined to strike again is not going to be easy. Not when Frost is battling his own demons. Not when the game is becoming so personal. And not when the killer's next move is unlike anything Frost expected. Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Genre Fiction

An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model--specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?

She can feel sorry for herself. Or she can listen…to the voice in her head. For Indigo Phillips, life has always been about basking in the shadow of her identical twin, Violet—the perfectly dressed, gentle, popular sister. The only problem the girls had in their lives was the occasional chaos that came with being part of the Phillips family brood. But when Violet becomes terminally ill and plans to die on her own terms via medically assisted death, Indigo spirals into desperation in her efforts to cope. That’s when she begins to hear a mysterious voice—a voice claiming to be God. The Voice insists that if she takes Violet to a remote rock formation in the Arizona desert, her sister will live. Incredibly, Violet agrees to go—if their dysfunctional family tags along for the ride. With all nine members stuffed into a wonky old paratransit bus, including their controlling older sister and distant mother, Indigo must find a way to face insecurities she’s spent a lifetime masking and step up to lead the trip. As she deals with outrageous mishaps, strange lodgings and even stranger folks along the way, Indigo will figure out how to come to terms with her sister, her family…and the voice in her head.

Our inner voice is a powerful compass that helps us navigate the world. At its worst it can seem like a demoralising critic, hellbent on sabotaging our potential; but if it is positively harnessed, it will become an inspiring coach and lifelong guide. In this book, psychology professor Ethan Kross brings more than 20 years of research to demystify the voice inside our head. Weaving cutting-edge science with compelling true stories, he shares powerful but simple tools to make your brain's musings work for you.

A dazzling and devastating memoir exploring breakdown and obsessive love, in a voice unlike any other

Based on extensive research in India and Pakistan, this new study examines the ways drumming and voices interconnect over vast areas of South Asia and considers what it means for instruments to be voice-like and carry textual messages in particular contexts. Richard K. Wolf employs a hybrid, novelistic form of presentation in which the fictional protagonist Muharram Ali, a man obsessed with finding music he believes will dissolve religious and political barriers, interacts with Wolf's field consultants, to communicate ethnographic and historical realities that transcend the local details of any one person's life. The result is a daring narrative that follows Muharram Ali on a journey that explores how the themes of South Asian Muslims and their neighbors coming together, moving apart, and relating to God and spiritual intermediaries resonate across ritual and expressive forms such as drumming and dancing.

Chion analyzes imaginative uses of the human voice by directors like Lang, Hitchcock, Ophuls, Duras, and de Palma.

Decibella is a loud talker. A really loud talker. She’s so loud, she’s hurting ears, startling wait staff, disrupting classmates, and annoying moviegoers. She doesn’t realize different environments and situations sometimes demand a softer, quieter voice. That is until a caring teacher introduces her to the silly-sounding word “Slurpadoodle” and the five volumes of voice (Whisper, 6-inch, Table Talk, Strong Speaker, and Outside).