DEVELOPMENT OF A VOICE ASSISTANT FOR MISSION PLANNING

A Voice Assistant for Mission Planning (VAMP) is proposed as a user interface for the Navy's Tactical Air Mission Planning System (TAMPS). This interface will be applied first to a current version of TAMPS which is used only prior to the conduct of the mission, and later to a cockpit mission planning tool that can be used to adjust plans while in-flight. The interface design will be based on explicit principles for design of voice interfaces which will in turn employ a state-transition-network representation of the current TAMPS graphical user interface (GUI) and a cognitive task analysis of mission planning performance. The design process will also specify measurable design criteria and methods for estimation of the performance of cnadidate designs on these criteria. Whereas airborne use of voice will be beneficial in permitting "hands free" interaction with the planning system, the goals of the initial ground-based application will be to provide intelligent assistance in interface navigation and also to enable off-line dictation of preliminary mission specifications. Plans for the evolution of VAMP along with future versions of TAMPS are also provided.