Interactive voice uncertainties for emergency communication suspends automation

Freedom Fone (FF) is an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System that integrates with the Global System for Mobile (GSM) telecommunications [1]. Sahana is a disaster information management expert system working with Internet technologies [2]. The Project intent was to mediate information between the FF and Sahana through the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) interoperable content standard [3]. It goal was to equip Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka´s largest humanitarian organization, with voice-enabled disaster communication. The 3.52 Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for voice quality was an early automation challenge in introducing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). A 4.0 MOS was determined as a cut-point for classifying reliable voice data [4]. The Percent Difficult (PD) in an emulated speaker-independent scenario was 29.44% and a speaker-dependent scenario was 13.24%. Replacing human operators with ASR software proved inefficient [5] and [6]. This paper discusses uncertainties that are barriers to integrating voice enabled automated emergency communication services for response resource analysis and decision support.