Intelligent Artificial Voice Systems

At last high qualitative audible announcements with flight information during the flight can be generated in the cabins of aircrafts with a new software package!

AviaVox, a Dutch manufacturer of automatic intelligent announcement systems for airports and airlines has expanded its activities to support the announcements that are made by both cabin staff and pilots during the flight. By making a frog-leap to the aircrafts, AviaVox continues to again add a software package to support the daily information needs of passengers whilst travelling.

Undoubtedly, the frequent traveler will recognize the sounds being spread by the loudspeakers in the cabin, polluting the air with nothing but noise, not contributing to any information that might be required. In fact the announcements often are so poor that one would really wonder why they are made in the first place. The forced attempts to address the passenger with another language than the cabin crew or the pilots are used to speak, only make things worse. But it can be even more worse: once the airplane is in the air, the overall noise of the engines is incredible and the sounds from the loudspeakers will immediately fade away when an announcement is made.

So why are these bad announcements still being made? First of all, some of them are simply compulsory by law. This particularly is the case for safety regulations and security. Other announcements are intended to provide the passenger with flight information, such as the conditions in the air, transfers and weather conditions at the destination. All these announcements are very useful as long as they are made in an audible and correct way.

We often seem to experience in the majority of the aircrafts that the audio equipment -especially the loudspeakers- are of a low quality to balance the budgets. This, however is not contributing at all to the quality of the announcements in environments with a lot of ambient noise. Having said that the larger airplanes today are equipped with monitors that support the audio announcements with video. This combination works out well, because the moving images enforce the often bad announcements in a positive way. But what about all those aircrafts that have no screens in the passenger areas?

 
All the aircrafts of the latter category share the same issues:

• Cabin staff's voices are not selected to make announcements;
• Cabin staff are not trained to make announcements;
• Cabin staff often only speak their native language;
• Pilots in the cockpit are isolated from the cabin and do not hear themselves speaking through the loudspeakers in the cabin and therefore cannot correct bad audibility
• If English is spoken, it is done with a huge slur of their native tongue;
• The acoustic limitations within the cabin are not dealt with;
• The high ambient noise is not adequately dealt with
• The quality of  the loudspeakers and microphones are often poor;
• The announcement effectiveness is low because of too much information is provided;
• Pre-recorded announcements are not flexible to deal with dynamic changes;

All of the above creates an announcement that cannot be understood by the passenger. In case of the frequent traveler this is of less importance as they do not tend to listen at all to the announcements; for them it is only noise that they have not asked for. And people who do not regularly fly get nervous because they feel insecure as they have not been able to listen to the information, that could have been essential to them.

All these issues have been identified by AviaVox, that has developed an entire new technology to make computers speak. Their systems, that use an unique phoneme-technology, are successfully being used by large Airports such as London Heathrow, Moscow, Amsterdam and New Delhi.

A phoneme is a very small digital speech fragment that -once used in a specific combination- creates a single word and a compilation of these words eventually generates complete sentences that can be spoken out by a computer. A word like "passengers" easily can be composed out of 36 different digital speech fragments, just to get the intonation, speed, volume and 'bridging' to other words right. The system software is truly to be considered as "Artificial Intelligence" as it has the ability to let the computer behave as if it was a human being.

This, for instance, implies that intelligent actions are being taken in case the system could not compile a specific word. It then simply will leave out the word it could not compose and will simply replace it by something else, hence adapting the complete grammar of the sentence in order to still make a sensible announcement. These kind of dynamic adaptations are something that normally belongs to intelligent living creatures that have dissolving capabilities for which they have trained their brains. The AviaVox systems can do it as well!

The AviaVox-systems share on thing in common: They all support the daily operations of staff in the Aviation-world by making effective audible announcements of a high quality in order to inform passengers adequately. This is done at airports, guiding travelers from one point at the airport to another and within the restricted areas of the Boarding gate to support the boarding procedures of an individual airline. For the latter application the system can already create more than 0.8 trillion different kind of grammatical constructions. That is really much!! To visualize that, if one would print that, it would take you about 2.000 trucks with a content of 10 tons just to move the paperwork around…

By literally spreading its wings, AviaVox now also accommodates the usage of their unique phoneme software in the cabins of aircrafts, hence creating more intelligible audible announcements in multiple languages that can be understood by basically every passenger. One can think about information about the weather at the destination, the flying height, the catering, the entertainment programs on board, but also courtesy announcements and information about connecting flights, changing gate numbers, security, safety and so on…

In this way the traveler is pleasantly guided and informed from the moment he sets foot on the doorstep of an airport till the moment he arrives at his destination. It looks as if AviaVox again has been able to deliver an innovative software package to the aero-market, closing the gaps in the overall information chain, thus meeting the expectations and requirements of passengers.