Title: Development of a framework for a collaborative and personalised voice assistant

Authors: Sangeetha Manoharan; Parth Natu

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, SRM Nagar, Kattankulathur-603203, Chennai, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, SRM Nagar, Kattankulathur-603203, Chennai, India

Abstract: Virtual assistant is an artificial intelligence (AI) system that understands natural voice commands and completes the task for the user. There is a need for seamless integration of high level general purpose voice assistants such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa under a single framework. In this paper, a novel collaborative personalised voice assistant with the ability to interface hardware components for an interactive environment is proposed. The proposed assistant takes the users' voice input as the query and processes it using a natural language processing (NLP) unit which generates intents from the converted text. Based on the type of intent, the NLP unit passes to one of the two services Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. If the query is related to requesting information, the NLP passes to Google Assistant which gives an appropriate answer as the voice input and/or a query related to controlling hardware objects, will be pass on to Amazon Alexa. To demonstrate our collaborative voice assistant, a servo motor is used as a hardware object which controls the movement of the 5-inch liquid crystal display (LCD). Results prove that the proposed collaborative voice assistant brings together the strengths of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa in a single framework.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; natural language processor; recurrent neural network; RNN; voice assistant.

DOI: 10.1504/EG.2021.112935

Electronic Government, an International Journal, 2021 Vol.17 No.1, pp.96 - 104

Accepted: 03 Dec 2019
Published online: 10 Feb 2021 *

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