A Voice-Enabled Procedure Navigator for the International Space Station

October 4, 2005
Manny Rayner | NASA Ames Research Center, California

Onboard the International Space Station, astronauts execute thousands of complex procedures to maintain life support systems, check out space suits, conduct science experiments and perform medical exams, among their many tasks. Today, when carrying out these procedures, an astronaut reads from paper procedures or a PDF viewer on a laptop computer, which requires the astronaut to shift attention from the task to scroll PDF pages. The goal of the Clarissa project has been to develop an experimental voice-operated procedure reader, enabling astronauts to be more efficient with their hands and eyes and give full attention to the task. The prototype version was delivered by a Russian Progress rocket on Christmas Day, 2004, and was successfully tested by astronaut John Phillips on June 27, 2005. To the best of our knowledge, Clarissa is the first spoken dialogue system ever to be used in space.

We will demo the Clarissa prototype and describe some of the techniques we have used to construct it, focusing in particular on the following aspects:

Converting text procedures into voice-navigable XML documents.
Flexible grammar-based speech recognition with the Open Source Regulus toolkit.
Support Vector Machine methods for “open mic” speech recognition.
Side-effect free dialogue management.

(Joint work with Beth Ann Hockey, Kim Farrell, Jean-Michel Renders and Nikos Chatzichrisafis)

Speaker Details

Manny Rayner received a B.A. in Mathematics from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Stockholm. From 1991 until 1999, he worked at SRI International’s Cambridge Computer Science Research Center, where he was PI on Spoken Language Translator, one of the world’s first major speech translation projects. Since leaving SRI, his work has centered on the development of Regulus, an Open Source platform that supports compilation of speech recognizers from unification grammars. He is currently working on Regulus-based projects at NASA Ames Research Center, California and Geneva University, Switzerland.