INCA Award 2009 submission: realtime train delay info by voice
Busy-person summary
It’s a voice application, not a (visual) web application. You call a phone number and get information.
Just relax and enjoy book report the following movie in Dutch:
or in French:
Goal of the voice application
To provide information by voice:
- on real-time train arrival and departure times (including delays)
- for any train station in Belgium
- to any person that speaks Dutch or French
- using any fixed or mobile phone
Target users
- Visually impaired people: all interaction is done by voice
- Car drivers using hands-free mobile phones
- People on the go without available Internet connection, e.g. between home/work and train station
- People who use phones without mobile Internet (yes, they will be around for a while!)
- People at home or in the office who don’t want to start up their computer, for whatever reason
- People calling the train company’s call centre, who want to be served immediately
Technical achievements
1) a web service layer on top of www.railtime.be:
- The screen scraper performs multiple page requests to provide information for the coming 30 to 60 minutes
- The time window depends on the importance of the station: more trains per minute, smaller time window
- Netiquette: intelligent shortest-path and geometrical distance algorithms prevent unnecessary server hits
This layer should be replaced with Infrabel’s own Web Service, as soon as it is (made) available technically and legally
2) a VoiceXML application in Dutch & French
- With a bilingual Dutch-French grammar containing about 1500 train station names
- Currently runs in development mode on a hosted speech platform (Voxeo)
Current accessibility of the service
Via a local 02 number (normal tariff) in Brussels
- This number was available for INCA Award jury members during the contest and, on request, for interested test users.
- As the application is back into development mode now, elements of the thesis assignments online writing we have closed this demo number.
- If you are interested in this application and would like us to demonstrate it to you on your premises, contact us here: in English, Dutch or French
Upgrade to production system will depend on:
- Data access agreement with Infrabel – this may or may not be the biggest hurdle
- Rental of production-ready voice application platform, requiring a moderate initial investment (only a few 1000 euros fixed cost, but still)
- Potential user feedback – your support may help!
Technical trivia
- Screen scraper & web service: about 1000 lines of PHP code
- Voice application: 2000 lines of VoiceXML-generating PHP code, 1000 lines of ECMAScript
- Behind both: MySQL database with linguistic and location data about Belgian train stations
Possible improvements
- More sophisticated processing of speech recognition N-best lists (station name recognition)
- Belgian voices for Dutch and French Text-to-Speech
- Self-learning features, based on patterns in usage history
Motivation and inspiration
Have fun!
Frederik