Persons with visual disability do not only have to deal with architectural barriers. How could the blind community gain access at any time to the information of an institution or company without moving from home and through a simple phone call? The research group GEDES, of the department of Computer Languages and Systems of the Universidad de Granada, has the answer; they are the responsible for the oral dialog system «University on the line», an initiative that allows to «talk» on the phone to a computer to obtain academic information 24 hours a day.
The project, supervised by the professor Ramón López-Cózar Delgado and the researcher Zoraida Callejas Carrión, intends to make the access of blind persons to new technologies easier. “Besides, there are many subjects who do not use the computer because communicating with it through a screen and a mouse seems like an impossible task to them. This is the case of older people”, says López-Cózar.
The oral dialog system «University on the line» only offers, for the moment, information about the Department of Computer Languages and Systems of the Universidad de Granada, in addition to data about the auto-enrolment process, although the idea is extending it soon to other faculties and departments. To obtain references about professors, subjects, web sites or PhD courses using this system, you only need to call 958 24 06 36.
More than 400 members of the university community have done it to date. “From the technical viewpoint, oral dialog systems such as «University on the line» are based on a combination of grammatical and acoustical information –points out Zoraida Callejas-. From the sentence pronounced by the user, the system can determine which is the most probable sentence combining both types of information”.
This project is framed in the research line «Dialog systems based on talk and multimodal processing», which has been working for years to help people to interact with technology, not only through computers, but also through computer equipment such as mobile phones or PDAs. In other research centres, the technology of multimodal systems is being also applied to pedagogical projects of intelligent teaching or virtual training systems to learn, for example, to deal with the heavy plant of a ship.
Professor Ramón López-Cózar, an expert on this type of systems, is convinced of that its application to robotics will give lead in future to “human-looking robots able to express their own ideas”.
The group of the UGR is currently collaborating with the Autonomous University of Madrid in the development of a multimodal system that will provide academic information and will allow to make bibliographic requests through GPS technology and «Bluetooth» from any point of a university campus. Likewise, they are collaborating with the Technical University of Valencia and other Spanish universities on the development of technologies that make the adaptation and personalization of these systems to different acoustic and application environments easier.
Reference
Prof Ramón López-Cózar Delgado / Zoraida Callejas Carrión. Dept of Computer Languages and Systems of the Universidad de Granada.
Phone numbers. 958 24 05 79 / 958 244 344.
E-mails: rlopezc@ugr.es / zoraida@ugr.es
