Voice assistants are becoming more and more popular and useful. However, none of the best-known voice assistants support the Slovene language. We also have not found any assistants that would support the entire pipeline of the voice assistant for Slovene language.
We have developed a voice assistant for Slovene language and for an Android device. Keyword detection is done locally on the device, without needing the Internet, and with a modified acoustic model. For speech recognition, we used an outside service with a bigger language model. For the logic of the voice assistant, we used Rasa. Rasa can detect the intent and context of the transcribed speech. The response from this service is used for speech synthesis and is then played back to the user.
We tested the application in two different environments, silent and noisy, and for the male and female voice. We also tested if the application functions properly if we use another service for speech recognition. The application worked best in the silent environment for a male speaker. In that case we finished the pipeline in 100% of tests. We achieved comparable results when we used another service for speech recognition. We finished the pipeline in 94% of tests.
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