Integrated solution
Usually, one will find the following components at an Airport: The AviaVox System offers an Airport an integrated solution by using all those existing resources, thus reducing the need for additional investments. On one hand the AviaVox System can be considered as a microphone input to the PA system and on the other hand it integrates with several of the above mentioned resources to gather its information to drive the system. The system works as follows: every time there is a status change of an individual flight, the AviaVox System receives a data dump of flight related information from the AODB (or Interface Broker). This information usually is transported as an ASCII string or XML file over a TCP/IP connection through the Local Area Network. By mirroring this information over the previous frames the AviaVox System can identify the applicable changes. Such a change, an event, can result into an announcement. However, this is defined in the parameter settings of the AviaVox System that reflect the Airport announcement policies. Assuming that an event results in an announcement, the system automatically will load the required grammar drivers to be able to generate a multilingual announcement. Thereafter, a search is done on the local voice-base on the Control Units of the Airport to find the required phonemes (speech fragments). Once the composition of the sentences has been made, the system can generate the announcement in the applicable languages and sends it to the PA interface. If the PA zone in which the announcement has to be made is available then it will use that PA zone and generate the announcement. In case the PA zone is occupied, then the system will store the announcement in a queue - within a limited time frame - until such time the PA zone is free again. This is the usual procedure. In practice, it often occurs that speech fragments cannot be found on the local voice-base. In that case automatically a communication session is started between the AviaVox Control Unit and the AviaVox Central Data Base (ACDB) in the Netherlands and the search is then repeated. If the speech fragment is found, this speech fragment is downloaded to the local voice-base of the Airport. The message then can be completed and will be sent to the applicable PA zone without operators being aware of it. At the same time, the local voice-base has been updated and automatically maintained. Worse case that can happen is that the missing speech fragment also cannot be found on the central voice-base in the Netherlands. Our artificial intelligence then changes the grammatical construction of the sentence and will replace a missing word by something else, or will delete it completely, and still will make a sensible announcement in the area. At the same time a log file is made of this event so that AviaVox can identify that a customer has tried to do something that the AviaVox System could not fulfil. These log files are being read by AviaVox employees daily. After thorough analysis AviaVox then will create the phoneme that could not be found and will add this phoneme to the central voice-base in the Netherlands so that next occasion this phoneme will be found. Important to understand is that all is done without the interference of a human being and that it is an automated real-time mechanism which ensures the generation of understandable announcements at all times. In other words: the system always continuous to make proper announcements with the correct information on a real-time basis. This implies that only those speech fragments are stored and hold on the local voice-base that actually operationally are being used at the Airport to reduce storage capacity on the hard disks. To even more improve the storage on these hard disks, the system automatically will locally remove those speech fragments that were not used over a longer period of time. In addition to the above, further optimization is reached by making a distinction between domestic and international flights where, by default, domestic flights are only generated and maintained in the native and English language.
