Virtual space crew

Scientists from NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley and Xerox Corporation have developed a sophisticated, voice-operated computer system to ease the workload of astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The so-called Clarissa system is "hands-free" and responds to astronauts' voice commands, reading procedure steps out loud as they work, helping keep track of which steps have been completed, and supporting flexible voice-activated alarms and timers, said Beth Ann Hockey, project lead on the team that developed Clarissa at NASA Ames.

Because the system is required to always be ready to accept a voice command, an original version of the system tried to process all spoken words, including conversations between crew members. As a result, it had difficulty discerning between conversations and commands given to the system.

In 2004, NASA Ames contacted Xerox in Grenoble, France, about a possible collaboration. They hoped that Xerox's experience in machine learning, linguistics and text categorization would increase the system's accuracy on the "open microphone" task.