The Design and Implementation of a Smart e-Receptionist

A smart e-Receptionist is a computer application that is capable of sensing approaching visitors, orally greeting them, picking up their voice and understanding their questions, and then talking back to them appropriately. It may also have a limited self-learning capability of accumulating “knowledge” through its interactions with visitors. In this article, we present the recently developed smart e-Receptionist that integrates video-based motion detection (for sensing a nearby visitor), natural speech recognition (for understanding a visitor's language), a question-answer (Q-A) knowledge database (for storing and managing information), and text-to-speech (TTS) (for a machine talking back to visitors). This e-Receptionist system can be easily converted into various information kiosks with slight modifications and configurations.