"VOICI has aimed to develop a natural crew assistant – designed to process natural spoken requests from the crew members and help them perform complex actions. Such an assistant can reduce the cognitive workload associated with the increasingly complex human-machine interfaces in modern aircraft cockpits.
VOICI's main goal has been to demonstrate the natural crew assistant at Technology Readiness Level 3, i.e. experimental proof of concept. This includes speech capture, speech recognition and interpretation, and speech synthesis for dialog with the crew. An Audio Evaluation Environment has been established, for developing and testing the crew assistant under realistic audio/noise conditions.
The project is part of the ""extended cockpit"" work package under Clean Sky 2's ""Systems"" technology demonstration. By reducing crew workload VOICI contributes to optimization of operations; flight safety, crew awareness, better maintenance, reduced cost of operations and generally higher efficiency and lower stress.
The consortium comprises 4 partners: SINTEF (Norway, R&D institute, coordinator), sensiBel (Norway, SME), Multitel (Belgium, R&D institute), Acapela (Belgium, SME).
Thales (France, Clean Sky 2 partner) is Topic Manager.
The project has run 24 months, ending February 2020. By the project end the main goal has been achieved - providing proof of concept demonstration of the crew assistant for two use cases selected by the Topic Manager. The project has contributed to innovation and job creation by improving component technologies, demonstrating the concept and establishing new cooperation within the consortium and with the Topic Manager."