Speech-Based Virtual Travel Assistant For Visually Impaired

Abstract

Visually-impaired people often feel handicapped and find it difficult to explore the world around them freely without any kind of help and assistance. This lack of independence restricts them from feeling confident about themselves. Furthermore, all virtual travel assistants currently existing in the market, are chatbots associated with textual interaction. While this may be useful more often than not, in certain situations, users may find textual interaction uncomfortable and prefer a conversational interface over text. An important issue of concern in the tourism industry is the monetary expense invested in travel guides by tourists. A travel assistant capable of acting as a virtual guide can help reduce this investment by a large factor. Hence, it is proposed to develop a speech-based travel bot capable of acting as a virtual tour guide. The bot will play the role of a tour guide by suggesting places and giving information about the place such as opening hours, rating, address to aid the user in knowing more about the place by interacting with the user and providing relevant information. The proposed system can also find great use in situations where a person may feel uncomfortable to text such as when driving. This speech-based virtual travel assistant/bot is implemented using speech recognition, speech synthesis, and natural language techniques to gather the user’s preference and provide the intended output. The developed bot has proved to be efficient for searching for different kinds of places and interacts well with the user and helps to find further details about a specific place as per the user’s queries. The intents for most of the queries are correctly recognized, which helps in efficient dialogue management.