Natural Laguage Voice User Interface
Project Summary
A European automaker was developing a concept car featuring a natural laguage voice interface for many of the in-car systems such as the on-board navigation system, radio, CD, and climate control. As a demonstration and proof-of-concept, we built a Windows NT simulator implementing L&H's speech recognition engine within our own app. The proof-of-concept was successful and led to a production contract. The version2 system was designed to run on a laptop computer and provide an in-car simulator capable of usability testing. The simulator used an external audio microphone, mounted aove the driver's sun visor, for receiving voice commands. A cassette adapter was used to feed simulator voice prompts from the laptop thru the car's audio system. A custom microcontroller/push-to-talk/LCD display, driven from the serial port of the laptop, was used to simulate the in-car dashboard visual display system and provided push-to-talk functionality. The in-car simulator also implemented mouse-driven manual navigation of all of the system's dialog models which operated independently of the voice recognizer.		[View Application State machine]
client: BMW
prototype team: Linguist, 2x Dev: Architect & UI, audio, PM prototype role: Windows NT/MFC GUI simulator programming, dialog state machine implementation. development time: 2 months production team: 2xLinguist, 5xDev, 2xaudio, localization, PM production role: Led 4 person Dev team, Windows NT/MFC GUI simulator programming, dialog state machine implementation, assisted with dialog modelling and led documentation effort, produced cognitive materials for script writers, fabricated in-car LCD display and PTT system interface (microcontroller). development time: 4 months