TaleTUC: Automatic Speech Recognition for a Bus Route Information System

Abstract

With the constant increase in smartphone sales, integrated sensors have becomeavailable to the average user. This allows for mobile applications to utilise theuser s context to provide more accurate information. The popularity of smartphones also attract developers to create audio functionalities that have earlier been restricted to calling interfaces. There is an increasing interest for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) services aimed at everyday tasks, where Apple s release of SIRI is a good example of a system that has contributed to the gained popularity. This report describes TaleTUC, a proof of concept system for the domain of bus route information. TaleTUC uses ASR combined with context-awareness through Case-based Reasoning (CBR), to recognise spoken bus stop names. It is built on a client-server architecture, where theTABuss (Marcussen and Eliassen, 2011) Android application has been extendedto operate as a client. As a TaleTUC client, TABuss uses speech as input to itsmain query functionality, which provides bus route suggestions through BusTUC and AtB s real-time system. Three modules have been developed server-side, where one is used for ASR, and the two others are used for context-awareness. Testing of the three modulescombined showed improved results compared to the ASR module alone, which indicates that context-awareness is a suitable technology to combine with ASR.