A VIRTUAL BUTLER CONTROLLED BY SPEECH

The aim of this work was to develop a virtual butler-service to be installed at home to control electrical appli-ances and to provide information about their conditions. The framework of this project lays on FAGOR Home Ap-pliance. The overall goal was to develop a smart home where anyone, even physically handicapped people, could control the appliance with the voice. A spoken dialog sys-tem was developed allowing a spontaneous and speaker independent speech input. A Speech Recognition mod-ule is used to convert the speech input signal into text. A speech-understanding model translates the recognized utterance into a sequence of task dependent frames. The Dialog Manager generates the most suitable answer. It also controls the device activation when the required in-formation is ready. The butler will be able to fully control and program a washing machine, a dishwasher machine and an oven, being able to show some recipes. In order to test the Speech Recognition module, a specific corpus was recorded in the FAGOR Home Appliance facilities. Some experiments were carried out with this corpus, obtaining up to a 67,31 % of improvement when using speaker and environment adaptation. 1