Abstract
A virtual assistant is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual. In 2017, the capabilities and usage of virtual assistants are expanding rapidly. In our work, we focused on virtual assistants integrated into smart devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home or Apple HomePod. Amazon virtual assistant Alexa has a leading position around the world and thanks to the opening the development platform, it offers an increasing number of available skills. The skill represents a functionality implemented by any independent developer and submitted for certification. After this skill passes certification, it is published in the Alexa Skills Store and available for anyone to use. We choose this virtual assistant as a new communication channel for traditional announcement about road traffic situation. We created two own skills to cover the typical questions about the current traffic situations like “how is the traffic in the city” or “how is the traffic on the way from one point to the second”, etc. For this purpose, we designed and implemented middleware services to get relevant data based on user request from the road traffic database. Both skills were submitted for the certification, and the first one is already available in the Alexa Skills Store.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-16-0213 and the Cultural and Educational Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education and Academy of Science of the Slovak Republic under grant No. 005TUKE-4/2017.
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Kerekešová, V., Babič, F., Gašpar, V. (2019). Using the Virtual Assistant Alexa as a Communication Channel for Road Traffic Situation. In: Choroś, K., Kopel, M., Kukla, E., Siemiński, A. (eds) Multimedia and Network Information Systems. MISSI 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 833. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98678-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98678-4_6
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