Abstract of My Research Project

  Project Title: Vocal Interaction and Distributed Computing for eHome Services

  Supervisor: Associate Professor Ian Vince McLoughlin

 Starting Date: 15/01/2007

 Project Description:

We live in a connected world with unimaginable information at our fingertips. With an Internet connection and a good search engine – we have but to reach out and grasp it. Therein lies the problem: we have to reach out using the computer as a passive digging tool just as humans have used such tools to dig and farm the soil for generations. Think about this for a second: why do we not make the computer do the digging? Now what happens if we go a step further? We can already make the computer dig for us; perhaps it is time to let the computer do some of the reaching out for us too.

Smart homes are probably the next wave of penetration of computational technology. They assume easy to use, ubiquitous computing access and so on, but achieving these goals presupposes a viable two-way communications channel between user and machine. More importantly, one that frees a user from a position in front of a keyboard, but which is usable in the real (acoustically noisy, multi-speaker) world.

This project has lofty aims: to accelerate the future adoption of vocally interactive computers through defining and building a demonstration project. Some features are as follows:

  Publication(s) for this Project: