Software Tools for Implementing Speech Agents in Crew Resource Management Training Systems

Crew resource management training systems are often constrained by the high cost and lack of flexibility in coordinating a large groups of human role players for part-task training. Motivated by the recent maturation of the speech synthesis and recognition technologies, speech-enabled crew role-player agents are being introduced to address these limitations. However, difficulties remain in customizing the synthetic speech agents in a timely manner. This proposal advances the development of speech agent implementation tools that will allow the end-users such as instructors and scenario designers to readily customize the set of supported utterances without external support and to provide pre-training modules for the trainees for enhancing speech recognition accuracy. Proposed work will leverage technologies from previous speech recognition technology development projects with the Navy and NASA. Feasibility demonstration of the proposed tool suite in the Anti-Submarine Warfare domain will be carried out during the Phase I research. A prototype software will be developed during the Phase II work and supplied to the Navy for further test and evaluation. Commercialization activities will be undertaken during the Phase III work.