Department of Defense Selects VoxGen

The U.S. Department of Defense selected VoxGen to add speech interface technology to its system that provides maintenance, operations, and engineering support for commercial and military vehicles.

Speech technology will enhance the vehicle preventative maintenance inspections and will also guide personnel through troubleshooting and maintenance procedures. The speech interface provides for hands-free recording of vehicle inspection data. The system will also provide a "multimodal" interface that provides maintenance instructions through speech using a wireless headset and visual access to diagrams and images on their mobile handset or PDA device.

Under the six-month project, speech technology will be incorporated into LEEDS, (Life-Cycle Engineering and Economic Decision System). The system, which has been developed by the Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT) Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies (CIMS) in New York, provides technical and economic data and decision making tools for equipment maintainers, engineers, and operations managers. The system holds information including design data, an inventory of repair parts suppliers, operational histories, and maintenance instructions.

In the integrated system, speech technology will be used to guide the user through the inspections and the observations will be recorded directly from the user's speech.

This project comes after VoxGen's work with Akimeka, which was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. Here, VoxGen developed a solution that integrates speech with the standard keyboard and mouse interfaces, to create a system for medical surveillance and monitoring of medical units in the defense field.