VISTA project wins RTS Technical Innovation Award

The VISTA (Virtual human Interface for a Set-Top box Agent) project won the Royal Television Society Technical Innovation Award 2003 for Advanced Engineering Techniques at the annual RTS Technical Innovation Awards ceremony held at Bafta on Monday November 3 2003.
With the goal of improving visually impaired viewers' access to digital TV, the recently completed 18-month project developed a prototype Electronic Programme Guide that viewers query by voice. The system then performs a search of standard EPG data and answers the viewers' queries in synthetic speech. The prototype system enables visually impaired viewers to select the programmes they want to watch from the hundreds of digital channels now available. Once the viewer has decided what to watch, the VISTA system automatically changes to the appropriate digital TV channel, or - if the programme is on at a later time - stores a reminder.
Led by the Independent Television Commission, VISTA project partners (British Sky Broadcasting Limited, City University London, Sensory Inc., Televirtual Limited, The University of East Anglia and The Victoria University of Manchester) have integrated in software a range of cutting edge technologies including a speaker independent speech recognition system, virtual human (avatar) technology, a speech synthesis system, and EPG search software. Key development challenges were the optimisation of the speech recognition capability of the prototype, effective and reliable integration of the technologies, and structuring the user-system interaction to enable viewers to search for the programmes they want quickly and easily. The system was developed on the basis of extensive initial research on the television viewing habits, behaviours and needs of visually impaired and elderly viewers and the final integrated prototype was optimised on the basis of the results of user evaluations of early versions of the prototype.
Dr Jonathan Freeman, VISTA Project Manager for the ITC, said: "The VISTA partners have worked hard to make their vision of the VISTA system a reality. I am delighted that the valuable work of the VISTA project towards improving the accessibility of digital TV to visually impaired viewers has been recognised by this prestigious award."
(GB)