A Voice Assisted Simulation-Animation Architecture

We introduce a software architecture that has been used to enable voice assistance for a simulation-animation environment by integrating technologies that recognize spoken language input and generate spoken language output. Voice assisted technology has several features which make user navigation within complex software applications easier than traditional methods, such as key-typed commands or mouse manipulation. While this environment might be more friendly to an end user, several challenges exist to a developer tasked with integrating these extremely diverse technologies into a single software architecture that must operate with computational efficiency. We present the requirements and design for a proposed software architecture, referred to as the Voice Assisted Simulation-Animation Architecture (VASArch), that attempts to address these problems. We also present the implementation of a prototype for simulating a single-server system with exponentially distributed customer interarrival and service times, called VASArch(M/M/1), which was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed software architecture. The prototype offers a user the ability to interact with the simulation model environment by providing input through spoken commands, mouse manipulation, and keyboard entry. In addition, the prototype provides output, which includes statistical information, in spoken and visual form for user examination