Online searching using speech as a man/machine interface

摘要

The work described in this article is part of a two-year research program to investigate and implement a voice interface for the British Library Blaise Online Information Retrieval System. Preliminary work consisted of the evaluation of an existing voice-accessed document database system to gain insights into the problems of voice interface design for online searching. Following that, a study was made to determine the syntax rules of the Blaise query language. Using this information, the new interface has been designed and software implementation of its core achieved. The main lessons learned from the evaluation of the existing speech interface are: (a) take full advantage of the syntax of the query language to limit the difficulty of the speech recognition process; and (2) avoid antagonizing the user by providing full control of the configuration of the interface, enabling varying degrees of audio reinforcement of visually presented data. Other considerations suggested the use of PROLOG as the most suitable development language for such an interface. Results of the evaluation show that the use of currently available speech recognition and synthesis hardware, along with intelligent software, can provide an interface well suited to the needs of online information retrieval systems.