@inbook{99df240f7cf548f9a5569ea98eea5b44,
title = "Practical Use of Virtual Assistants and Voice User Interfaces in Engineering Laboratories",
abstract = "Automatic Question-Answering (QA) systems and speech recognition/synthesis functionality and accuracy has improved dramatically over the last decade allowing the use of voice interactions for increasingly complex tasks. Virtual assistants, based on speech-based services are growing in popularity and are now entering the mainstream. These services and devices come with a set of built-in capabilities and in some instances allow the creation and addition of new functionality and abilities facilitating their use in a range of diverse application areas.Practical electronic and electrical engineering laboratories for undergraduate students are evolving incrementally driven by affordable instrumentation and hardware kit with internet access but remain fundamentally unchanged. This pa-per explores the practical use of virtual assistants and voice user interfaces in electronic and electrical engineering laboratories to tutor and assess students while accessing and controlling test instrumentation and circuits. The re-purposing of existing teaching resources and material for use in this context is discussed and a case study and practical working example of a virtual assistant enabled laboratory demonstrating the viability of this approach is shown.",
keywords = "Automatic Question-Answering (QA) systems, speech recognition and synthesis, virtual assistants, voice user interface practical laboratories",
author = "MJ Callaghan and {Bogdan Putinelu}, Victor and Jeremy Ball and Salillas, {Jorge Caballero} and Thibault Vannier and {Gomez Egu{\'i}luz}, Augusto and Niall McShane",
note = "Reference text: 1. A. Bouziane, D. Bouchiha, N. Doumi, M. Malki, Question Answering Systems: Survey and Trends, Procedia Computer Science, Volume 73, 2015, Pages 366-375, ISSN 1877-0509. 2. Khillare S a Ajitkumar M. Pundge and Namrata C Mahender. Question Answering System, Approaches and Techniques. Int. Jour. of Computer Applications 141(3):34-39, May 2016 3. Microsoft. 2016. Conversational intelligence. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.mi-crosoft.com/en/mobile/experiences/cortana/. [Accessed 30 November 2016]. 4. Amazon. 2016. Started with the Alexa Skills Kit. [ONLINE] Available at: https://devel-oper.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/getting-started-guide. [Accessed 30 November 2016]. 5. Amazon. 2016. Amazon Web Services Internet of Things. [ONLINE] Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/iot-platform/how-it-works/. [Accessed 30 November 2016]. 6. Feisel, L. D. and Rosa, A. J. (2005), The Role of the Laboratory in Undergraduate Engineer-ing Education. Journal of Engineering Education, 94: 121–130. 7. Black, A.W., & Taylor, P. (1997). Automatically clustering similar units for unit selection in speech synthesis. Proceedings of Eurospeech 1997 (pp. 601–604). Athens, Greece. 8. Amazon. 2016. Amazon Echo Interaction Model. [ONLINE] Available at: https://devel-oper.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-voice-service/reference/interaction-model. [Accessed 30 November 2016]. 9. E. Lindsay, D. Liu, S. Murray, and D. Lowe, “Remote Laboratories in Engineering Education: Students{\textquoteright} Perceptions,” Proc. 18th Ann. Conf. Assoc. for Eng. Edu. (AaeE {\textquoteright}07), 2007 10. D. Lowe, S. Murray, E. Lindsay and D. Liu, {"}Evolving Remote Laboratory Architectures to Leverage Emerging Internet Technologies,{"} in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 289-294, Oct.-Dec. 2009. doi: 10.1109/TLT.2009.33 11. IO Suite. 2016. Keysight IO. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.keysight.com/en/pd-1985909/io-libraries-suite?cc=GB&lc=eng. [Accessed 30 November 2016]. 12. Amazon. 2016. Amazon web services. [ONLINE] Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/. [Accessed 30 November 2016]. 13. M.J. Callaghan, K. McCusker, J.L. Losada, J.Harkin, S. Wilson. {"}Using Game Based Learning in Virtual Worlds to Teach Electronic and Electrical Engineering, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Informatics, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 575 - 584, Feb 2013. 14. Amazon Alexa/Echo demo. 2016. Practical lab for Series Parallel circuit. [ONLINE] Avail-able at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDpx9jZ-WKs&spfreload=10. [Accessed 30 November 2016]",
year = "2017",
month = sep,
day = "13",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-319-64352-6_62",
language = "English",
isbn = "978-3-319-64351-9",
volume = "vol 22",
pages = "660--671",
editor = "Michael Auer and Zutin, {Danilo Garbi}",
booktitle = "Online Engineering & Internet of Things. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems",
publisher = "Springer",
address = "Switzerland",
}