The Client

The Client is a leading electronics brand that builds and supplies low cost PC’s, Smartphones, Tablets & Wearables. They are well established and present in more than 70 countries and well regarded in emerging markets across Europe, Middle East, Africa & CIS Region. They had developed a specific version of android tablets targeted at children and wanted to incorporate a voice assistant in it.

Service Offerings

Services

Technology Stack

Problem Statement

The client wanted to build a voice assistant application that would enable children to interact with the tablet through voice. The application should be triggered by a voice command /key word (like Ok Google or Hey Siri). The application should work online and offline and should provide answers to a predefined library of questions. If the questions asked are not in the library, the application should search online on google and provide an answer. The library of questions will be updated regularly and pushed through software updates.

Business Requirements

Our Solution

We set up an agile product team to execute this project. The team consisted of an Architect, Tech Lead, Back end developers, Android Developers & Quality Analysts. We worked in bi-weekly sprints to demonstrate continuous progress and iterate quickly based on feedback.

The application is based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS). The application converts the speech input from the child into text before processing it. The result is then converted to voice through TTS before being played back. The voice of the application is modified from the already available google voice libraries.

Challenges

  • The client had multiple versions of the tablets with different hardware configurations. They were also using custom versions of Android OS.
  • The application had to be integrated with the target hardware and locked so that it would not be compatible with any other hardware.
  • Since these were low cost tablets, the available hardware configurations were low and did not have high end performance capabilities.

Results/Outcome

  • We developed the application for one specific hardware version. We decided to expand it to other hardware versions after extensive trials.
  • The application was designed to support Android 4.4 & above
  • We developed the first version of the application which supported different global English accents including US, AU, CA, GB, SA, IN & UK.
  • We incorporated a kid’s voice TTS to answer the questions. This was done with the intention of making the application more relatable to children, who were the target audience. We sampled a few voice samples before finalising.
  • We created an initial library of 200 Questions which would be available in the offline mode
  • The performance of the app was fine tuned to provide offline responses in under 2 seconds.

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