Software embeds vocal technical support

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 28, 2004

Voice Prompt is a novel software application for home consumer electronics and portable devices.

Voice Prompt is a novel software application for home consumer electronics and portable devices.

As home appliances get smarter, user manuals are getting even thicker, and users increasingly tend to skip everything after the chapter entitled "How to get it working".

As a result, a considerable number of powerful functions can be lost to the customer simply due to lack of information.

This inevitably places increasing demands on tech support departments, adding costs for manufacturers and suppliers.

One efficient remedy to this problem is to use a voice prompt assistant that can provide context-dependent explanations and offer hints to the user.

Integrating Spirit's Voice Prompt solution into consumer electronics provides the perfect interactive user manual, making it an attractive value-add for small home appliances, television and audio equipment, and portable/mobile devices.

When used in medical equipment, timely voice prompts can literally mean the difference between life and death.

The solution is based on Spirit's family of vocoders, providing efficient speech compression and storage.

Voice prompt messages are digitised, compressed, converted to the desired digital format, and stored in Flash memory to be played on request.

Software vocoders from Spirit enable voice-prompting functionality for consumer devices by using the central DSP/RISC processor of the device.

No additional hardware is required.

If the target device includes a video display of 100 x 100 resolution or better, Voice Prompt can be complemented with an animated assistant - a cartoon-like entity on the display.

The assistant reads out voice prompt messages, gestures and changes its facial expressions as appropriate.