A FRAMEWORK FOR INTELLIGENT VOICE-ENABLED E-EDUCATION SYSTEMS

Although the Internet has received significant attention in recent years, voice is still the most convenient and natural way of communicating between human to human or human to computer. In voice applications, users may have different needs which will require the ability of the system to reason, make decisions, be flexible and adapt to requests during interaction. These needs have placed new requirements in voice application development such as use of advanced models, techniques and methodologies which take into account the needs of different users and environments. The ability of a system to behave close to human reasoning is often mentioned as one of the major requirements for the development of voice applications. In this paper, we present a framework for an intelligent voice-enabled e-Education application and an adaptation of the framework for the development of a prototype Course Registration and Examination (CourseRegExamOnline) module. This study is a preliminary report of an ongoing e-Education project containing the following modules: enrollment, course registration and examination, enquiries/information, messaging/collaboration, e-Learning and library. The CourseRegExamOnline module was developed using VoiceXML for the voice user interface(VUI), PHP for the web user interface (WUI), Apache as the middle-ware and MySQL database as back-end. The system would offer dual access modes using the VUI and WUI. The framework would serve as a reference model for developing voice-based e-Education applications. The e-Education system when fully developed would meet the needs of students who are normal users and those with certain forms of disabilities such as visual impairment, repetitive strain injury (RSI), etc, that make reading and writing difficult

The VoiceApp System: Speech Technologies to Access the Semantic Web

Proceedings of: 14th Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence, CAEPIA 2011, La Laguna, Spain, November 7-11, 2011Maximizing accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of web applications, specially if it is concerned with facilitating access for disabled people. In this paper we present the VoiceApp multimodal dialog system, which enables to access and browse Internet by means of speech. The system consists of several modules that provide different user experiences on the web. Voice Dictionary allows the multimodal access to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, Voice Pronunciations has been developed to facilitate the learning of new languages by means of games with words and images, whereas Voice Browser provides a fast and effective multimodal interface to the Google web search engine. All the applications in the system can be accessed multimodally using traditional graphic user interfaces such as keyboard and mouse, and/or by means of voice commands. Thus, the results are accessible also for motorhandicapped and visually impaired users and are easier to access by any user in small hand-held devices where graphical interfaces are in some cases difficult to employ.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN 2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC 2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS 2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

Transcoding multilingual and non-standard web content to voiceXML

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-119).Transcoding systems redesign and reformat already existing web interfaces into other formats so that they can be available to other audiences. For example, change it into audio, sign language or other medium. The bene_t of such systems is less work on meeting the needs of di_erent audiences. This thesis describes the design and the implementation details of a transcoding system called Dinaco. Dinaco is targeted at converting HTML web pages which are created using Extensible MarkupLanguage (XML) technologies to speech interfaces. The di_erentiating feature ofDinaco is that it uses separated annotations during its transcoding process, while previous transcoding systems use HTML dependent annotations. These separated annotations enable Dinaco to pre-normalize non-standard words and to generate VoiceXML interfaces which have semantics of content. The semantics help Textto-Speech (TTS) tools to read multilingual text and to do text normalization. The results from experiments indicate that pre-normalizing non-standard words and appending semantics enable Dinaco to generate VoiceXML interfaces which are more usable than those which are generated by transcoding systems which use HTML dependent annotations. The thesis uses the design of Dinaco to demonstrate how separating annotations makes it possible to write descriptions of content which cannot be written using external HTML dependent annotations and how separating annotations makes it easy to write, maintain, re-use and share annotations

Supporting Mobile Connectivity: from Learning Scenarios to Multichannel Devices: Special Issue on "Learning as a Ubiquitous and Continuous Communication Attitude"

Guest Editor: Piet KommersInternational audienceThe introduction of distance learning does not only bring a wider audience, but also much more diversity among the learners: first, because it can be integrated more easily into a Life-long Learning strategy; secondly, because the learners are not restricted to a sing le area and thus learners from different countries and with different cultures follow the curriculum. We have observed this in various DL diplomas in which we participate. In this article, we will shed some light on the difficulties and challenges arising from these multi-cultural settings. Based on our research work, we would like to insist on two particular points which are the necessity to adapt the pedagogical settings (e.g. pedagogical scenarios) according to the learners' behaviour to overcome unforeseen problems due to cultural differences and the importance of considering mobile technologies to overcome limited access to the technology in developing countries and to ensure continuous interaction among learners and with tutors

Automatic translation of formal data specifications to voice data-input applications.

This thesis introduces a complete solution for automatic translation of formal data specifications to voice data-input applications. The objective of the research is to automatically generate applications for inputting data through speech from specifications of the structure of the data. The formal data specifications are XML DTDs. A new formalization called Grammar-DTD (G-DTD) is introduced as an extended DTD that contains grammars to describe valid values of the DTD elements and attributes. G-DTDs facilitate the automatic generation of Voice XML applications that correspond to the original DTD structure. The development of the automatic application-generator included identifying constraints on the G-DTD to ensure a feasible translation, using predicate calculus to build a knowledge base of inference rules that describes the mapping procedure, and writing an algorithm for the automatic translation based on the inference rules.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .H355. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0354. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006

Creating a low cost VoiceXML Gateway to replace IVR systems for rapid deployment of voice applications

VoiceXML gateway which can be used to replace traditional Interactive Voice Re-sponse (IVR) platforms. The gateway is created by integrating a VoiceXML inter-preter, OpenVXI and a PBX, Asterisk, producing a Linux based, open source, sys-tem which is both a PBX and a VoiceXML browser. Reasons for choosing the components for the gateway and then the integration of these components are dis-cussed. VoiceXML applications can be used to replace IVR systems, which are then rendered by the gateway