Nuance Blasts Off!

The International Space Station has a new crew member - Clarissa, a virtual assistant powered by Nuance's ASR engine. Apparently, notebook computers have a tendency to float away from the floating crew members, and speech interfaces are just the ticket for getting tasks done more efficiently. The grammars were constructed using the open source Regulus platform.

The speech UI for the water quality analysis procedures described in the article have me wondering if there might be a better choice of commands. I can see "complete" and "repeat" getting mixed up in a hurry. If they have a "exit" with that "next" command, they may have similar problems.

According to the NASA website, this is the first spoken dialogue system in space. Congrats Nuance!

Read the article.
NASA's Clarissa Project site.