Volume 13, Number 2/3/4

An Implementation of Voice Assistant for Hospitality

  Authors

Sagina Athikkal and John Jenq, Montclair State University, USA

  Abstract

Voice user interface has gained popularity in the recent years. A chatbot is a machine with the ability to answer automatically through a conversational interface. Instead of using mouse and keyboards as input and screen as output, a chatbot with extra voice user interface feature improve the system and enhance the user experience. A chatbot is considered as one of the most exceptional and promising expressions of human computer interaction. Voice-based chatbots or artificial intelligence (AI) devices transform humancomputer bidirectional interactions that allow users to navigate an interactive voice response (IVR) system with their voice generally using natural language. In this paper, we focus on voice based chatbots for mediating interactions between hotels and guests from both the hospitality technology providers’ and guests’ perspectives. A hotel web application with voice user interface was implemented which provides voice input/output interface to enhance the user experience. Speech recognition component was used to dictate the user voice input to text. Speech synthesis API was used for text to voice conversion. A closed domain question answering (cdQA) Natural Language Processing (NLP) solution was used for processingof query and return the best answer possible.

  Keywords

Natural Language Processing, Chatbot, Voice Based Digital Assistants, Closed Domain Question Answering.