This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project addresses the widespread need to improve the productivity of the student learning process in a wide variety of public, private and commercial environments. Using the Internet. speaktomi, LLC. has conceived, developed, and, demonstrated an innovation: a natural language query system (NLQS). This system is an Internet-based intelligent query system that combines distributed speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies. Speaktomi demonstrated and tested a NLQS prototype system using English in 2000 and Japanese in May 2001. The core technology of speaktomi's NLQS is a set of proprietary software components, integrated by speaktomi, LLC., using speaktomi's architectures and approaches (patents applied for) which support several languages and require no speaker training. The objectives of this research are to advance the performance of the NLQS system to the point of being able to define the specifications for a commercial product embodying NLQS. Specifically we will improve the system accuracy, latency, port the system to a PDA and identify client-server bottlenecks. The applications span learning grades K3-16 and above, in a broad array of commercial and military training programs, and when in combination with a translation engine, the NLQS technology can form a basis for systems that support interactive queries and real time collaboration across several languages.
