Shh! The Computer Is Listening

By Shannon Cochran

July 11, 2005

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Last week I had the opportunity to speak to Jean-Michel Renders, a computer scientist at Xerox Research Centre Europe, about his work on a project called Clarissa. Clarissa is a computer, built in collaboration with NASA and destined for installation at the International Space Station, that's designed to operate primarily through a speech interface. It turns out that astronauts may be required to perform any of about 12,000 procedures during the normal course of their time aboard the ISS—maintaining life-support systems, inspecting space suits, conducting science experiments, performing medical exams and so on. And, as astronaunt Michael Fincke told Xerox: "Just try to analyze a water sample while scrolling through pages of a procedure manual displayed on a computer monitor while you and the computer float in microgravity."

So NASA wanted a computer that could guide the astronauts through their work in a hands-free way. But as Renders explained, the challenges in building such a system are not trivial. Speech recognition itself isn't much of a problem anymore—the commercial Nuance program, extended with some specialized terms and knowledge, proved adequate for Clarissa: even in an environment where many of the users are not native English speakers and may have thick accents. No, the really tricky part was getting Clarissa to distinguish between commands directed at the system and normal astronaut chatter. It's a problem Renders calls "vocal spam filtering." After all, if the computer starts reciting procedure commands while an astronaut is talking to mission control or to a crewmate, the potential for annoyance and lost efficiency is high.

"When an astronaut doesn't expect a response from the machine [but gets one], his concentration is lost," Renders says. It's actually much worse than having the computer fail to respond to a legitimate command.

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