Speech user interactions in the Project54 system

A typical police cruiser is filled with electronic devices, displays, and inputs, all competing for the officer’s attention. The Project54 system integrates those devices, and its speech user interface lets officers operate them without taking their eyes off the road. As of September 2006, the Project54 system has been deployed in approximately 800 cruisers.

The system’s speech user interface is a command and control interface and it utilizes a Microsoft speech recognizer. Field evaluation of the SUI produced a corpus of almost 50,000 utterances and showed that the SUI responds correctly about 85% of the time.

Based on our deployment experiences we are in the process of making several improvements to the Project54 SUI. For example, we have used our corpus to train the speech recognizer and are currently collecting data in the field to assess the effectiveness of this training. Our efforts also include driving simulator evaluations of the safety of using the Project54 SUI while driving. Finally, moving away from command and control interactions, we are studying how users can have multi-threaded dialogues with computers in hands-busy, eyes-busy situations, such as driving.

Speaker Details

Andrew L. Kun is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of New Hampshire. His primary research interest is in speech user interface design for mobile computing. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of New Hampshire. He is a member of the IEEE and Tau Beta Pi. Contact him at andrew.kun@unh.edu.

Date:
Speakers:
Andrew L. Kun and Thomas Miller
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
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