Digital Assistant Persona Adaptation for Public Safety Incidents
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Solution Overview
Problem
Digital assistants lack the ability to convey urgency or importance effectively due to their consistent voice characteristics, making it difficult to distinguish between routine and critical information, especially in public-safety scenarios.
Innovation Solution
A method and apparatus that allows a digital assistant to change its persona based on detected public-safety incidents, using criteria such as computer-aided dispatch IDs, message priority, and sensor data to adjust voice characteristics like gender, tone, and cadence, enabling more effective communication of urgency.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If a digital assistant uses a consistent voice and persona for all communications, then the system maintains simplicity and stability in its design, but it fails to convey urgency, importance, or distinguish emergency incidents effectively
Solution Approach 1:
The digital assistant dynamically changes its voice characteristics (pitch, tone, cadence, volume) based on the detected incident type and priority level. The system transitions from a static persona to a dynamic one that adapts its auditory properties in real-time to convey urgency and importance differentially across various incident scenarios.
Solution Approach 2:
The system modifies specific acoustic parameters of the voice including pitch frequency, tone quality, speech cadence, and volume levels according to the incident classification. Different parameter sets are applied based on the detected situation, enabling the same digital assistant to convey different levels of urgency through controlled parameter variations.
2Loss of information
If a digital assistant provides the same voice feedback for all types of information, then the system maintains ease of operation and user predictability, but it creates difficulty for users to distinguish between routine and critical information
Solution Approach 1:
The digital assistant applies different voice quality characteristics to different types of information based on their priority and incident type. Critical information receives distinct acoustic treatment (different pitch, tone, or cadence) compared to routine information, allowing users to locally differentiate information importance through auditory cues without changing the overall system operation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses voice characteristics as auditory 'colors' to differentiate information types. Just as color changes can indicate different states or priorities visually, the digital assistant employs variations in pitch, tone, and cadence as auditory indicators to signal the urgency and importance of different messages, enabling users to quickly categorize information based on its acoustic signature.
3Reliability
If a digital assistant uses multiple personas with different voice characteristics, then the system can effectively convey different levels of urgency and importance, but it increases the complexity of the system architecture
Solution Approach 1:
The digital assistant serves multiple communication functions using a single unified system. Rather than requiring separate persona modules for different incident types, the system uses one versatile voice synthesis engine that can adapt its characteristics across various scenarios, achieving multi-functionality through parameter adjustment rather than through multiple independent components.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces an intermediary layer between the incident detection logic and the voice output. This intermediary module analyzes the incident type and priority level, then selects and applies appropriate voice parameters as a mediator between the raw data and the final auditory output, simplifying the overall architecture by centralizing the persona management function.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and apparatus for changing a persona of a digital assistant is provided herein. During operation a digital assistant will determine a public-safety incident type and then change its persona based on the public-safety incident type.