@WORK - Technology - Institute for Infocomm Research

Over the past 30 years, speech technologies, which include the likes of speech recognition, text-to-speech, and natural language understanding, have improved by leaps and bounds. Despite the technology’s coming of age, however, only a handful of market segments such as enterprise call centres and reservation services have begun to use voice user interface solutions to automate services and decrease costs. One of the main reasons for this slow adoption is the painstaking application development process.

The EVITA project seeks to change this market situation by creating a rapid application development technology called EVITA-RAD. The advantages of EVITA-RAD are manifold: it significantly decreases the amount of time, expertise, and specialized software required to design, develop and deploy enterprise-level speech applications. Through these potential gains, it aims to stimulate the widespread adoption of speech solutions.

Features & Benefits

EVITA-RAD is an internet-based speech application development and deployment solution. Currently, there exist similar tools that give the public access to development and deployment capabilities. However, they lack the user-friendly interface and the ability to build complex data-driven applications that are central to the EVITA-RAD design. Not only is EVITA-RAD notable for its simple to use interface, it is also designed to create industry standard applications in less time of production and time to deployment.

EVITA-RAD possesses three major benefits over existing speech application development tools:
1.	Reduce development time – A user-friendly interface minimises the time-consuming and repetitive coding required to develop in VoiceXML. The same application can now be created in a fraction of the time previously needed.
2.	Lower level of expertise required – Through our modular approach, building complex systems has never been easier. This allows even novice users to create large and elaborate applications.
3.	Eliminate need for specialized software and hardware – EVITA-RAD provides a complete design, testing, and deployment environment, and hosts all applications and database on our server.

Using EVITA-RAD, a complex application requiring specialists months to develop can now be completed by one person in a matter of weeks.

Figure 1 : EVITA-RAD’s simple to use work flow

Applications of the technology & Achievements
EVITA-RAD has been used to design, build, and deploy multiple applications, such as an automatic directory assistant, a leave application system, and a hospital appointment making system. It has been extensively tested in-house, and has progressed to be adopted by industry.

Schools have also benefited from the technology. EVITA-RAD has led to a technology licensing to Singapore Polytechnic, in which students venture their innovations through many successful voice applications.

Additionally, EVITA-RAD has also been a boon to WholeTree Technology, which deploys Singapore’s first voice automation in the healthcare sector through the “Voice-Enabling Tan Tock Seng Hospital” project. This is a joint initiative to use EVITA-RAD technology 24x7 that fully automates:

a) Call-transfers
b) Paging services
c) Telephone enquiries
d) Outpatient appointments
e) Emergency activation of hospital staff

The initiative was well received and was duly rewarded with the “TEC Innovator Award” in PS21 ExCEL Convention 2004.

For enquiries/explore collaboration, please contact:
Industry Development Department
Tel: 65 6874 8399
Fax: 65 6775 9923
Email: inddev@i2r.a-star.edu.sg

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