A speech driven in-car assistance system

This paper refers to a distant-talking interaction system in the car environment being developed at our labs. The system shares many aspects with the European project VICO (Virtual Intelligent CO-driver), to which ITC-irst and Bosch GmbH contributes. Target of the project is to allow a real natural dialogue with a user while driving a car, enabling him/her to get driving assistance, hotel and restaurant reservation and tourist information. The system is based on a HMM speech recognizer for the Italian language, a Dialog Manager module that handles the interaction with the user and a module that retrieves data from databases, called Car Wide Web. In this paper we focus on the structure of the Car Wide Web module, the databases containing the information being used in the project, the specific API developed to access the databases and the corpus of spontaneous speech interactions collected using the Wizard-of-Oz method.