Virtual assistants as Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now have been well-known in the market; however, Vietnamese users seldom harness them due to their lack of optimisation for Vietnamese people, not yet analysing and identifying the intention of user through user’s Vietnamese command. Before this fact, the authors of University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University in Hanoi have developed a "virtual assistant" application for the Vietnamese with the name VAV (Virtual Assistant for Vietnamese).

From the perspective of technology, VAV is designed and developed based on the inheritance of important technologies and services available such as voice recognition services of Google, digital maps, online news sites, information financial news, weather, Wikipedia... and many other online applications to bring users more useful information.

Featured technology solution of the group is to find out techniques of artificial intelligence, machine learning, processing and understanding natural languages which are suitable for VAV to analyze and capture the user's intention though they express their requirements in many different ways without having to follow any given format. With these techniques, VAV can analyze spoken sentences and understand your intention to execute what you want to accurately and quickly. For example, when you asks “từ đây đến Hải Phòng đi thế nào - from here how to get Hai Phong", VAV opens map apps and then displays the detailed route from your current location to Hai Phong; if you ask VAV "thức mình dậy sau một tiếng rưỡi nữa - wake me up after an hour and a half", VAV immediately set the alarm time counting from the current time plus 1 hour 30 minutes...

The first version of VAV was launched on Google Play dated on 18 November 2015 and immediately attracted the attention of many users. After only two months available on Google Play, VAV had 75,000 downloads and installations. According to Google Play’s statistics, in this period, there were more than 7,300 VAV users who made reviews with the average satisfaction level of 4.74/5.0. There were more than 4,200 participants to comment, give feedbacks about VAV, and most of them were positive feedbacks and supports to continue to update and expand VAV’s features as well as develop it on mobile operating systems like iOS and Windows Phone.

For more information, please contact: Dr. Phan Xuan Hieu - University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University

No.144 Xuan Thuy street, Cau Giay district, Hanoi;

Tel: +844.37547461; Fax: +844.37547460;

Email:  coltech@vnu.edu.vn

Source: khoahocvacongnghevietnam.com.vn