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Breaking the language barrier
A system that enables emergency services and other organisations to communicate with non-English speakers is being launched at BAPCO 2008. BAPCO Journal interviewed Bob Carnell of Lattice to find out more about the innovative new product.
First Contact is a suite of software that can be used by call operators; front desk staff with touch screens; and officers on the street equipped with mobile data devices.
The system integrates with telephone, computing, Internet and mobile technologies, and works as a system of multilingual, pre-configured dialogues.
A police operator using First Contact can identify the language of a caller in a matter of seconds. The system enables the operator to ascertain the key facts of a given situation (e.g. a traffic accident, the number of cars involved, casualties etc) in order to deploy the suitable resources.
At the front desk of a police station, First Contact allows an officer and a visitor to communicate via touch screens. Once a language is established, the officer can establish the reason for the visit – e.g. to report an assault – and also collect details such as description of the attacker and time/location of the incident.
Officers on the street can deploy First Contact via their PDAs, and – for example – ask a Latvian motorist in their own language if they have drunk alcohol in the last 20 minutes. The officer can then go on to explain that he is authorised by law to ask the motorist to take a breathalyser test, in Latvian, and talk the motorist through the use of the device.
“We have been working on this for nearly two years,” explains Bob Carnell, co-founder of Lattice. “Although First Contact is not in use yet, we are trialling it with one of the largest police forces in the UK – and we have started a dialogue with about half of the forces in the UK.” The First Contact system is being launched at BAPCO 2008, where the company can be found at Stand 524.
Getting to launch stage has been challenging. “First we needed some scripts before presenting the solution to the police forces. We are not police officers so the first stage was research, and looking closely at Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s report and the NPIA’s work. We were then able to come up with initial scripts of the types of questions that officers would be asking in particular scenarios.”
Once a police force expressed an interest and decided to take the lead, a six month process of refining the dialogues specifically for the call handlers followed.
The system can accommodate any number of languages, and Bob emphasises that although First Contact can handle as many as 250 languages, most police forces realistically need only around 50.
“But although there are a lot of languages, the number of questions required are not huge. In a given scenario you only need to ask five or six questions to know what to do to resolve the situation.” The major hurdle for developing First Contact was finding a way to join together the disparate technologies. “The system had to be able to cope with people communicating via telephony, face to face, or in the street. It meant we had to understand in detail not just the client hardware and software but also how the IT, telecoms and internet infrastructures needed to be integrated.
“Although many people have been talking about the ultimate convergence of IT, internet and telephony, very few have integrated all three. The level of details you have to go into is extraordinary. In a call centre, the call handlers use telephony and a browser to connect to the Lattice server, but you find that each browser behaves very differently. The practical differences between browsers can be substantial, and similarly the different operating systems for mobile devices have to be addressed.
“We have cracked it now – the system works in real time and is operates in sync across these diverse technologies. So for example when you have a call handler asking a question from a browser, it has to get to the server, and then back to the telephony system. The two have to be in sync in real time, otherwise you the officer might get the wrong answer to his question.”
According to Bob, who has tested the system on friends and family, using the system feels like actual communication between two people, as opposed to speaking to a computer, “and that is down to the strength of the scripted dialogues.” Interestingly, there is no reason for English to be the main language of First Contact, and indeed the technology could work equally well between Mandarin and Portuguese, for instance.
The commercial potential for First Contact is clearly far beyond that of the emergency services, and indeed Bob is in talks with leading telecoms, mobile telephony companies and systems integrators in order to address the wide range of markets for this innovative system.
Technical highlights
First Contact has been designed and built using all the relevant standards applicable to telephony, computing and the Internet. The applications need no proprietary equipment. All the functionality is available using the existing hardware and software that a client company would normally be using already, such as telephones, mobiles, PDAs, servers, personal computers and web browsers. Also, all the applications have been designed from the outset to satisfy all the large enterprise needs for robustness, reliability and resilience.
The First Contact applications have been developed for UNIX, using the C programming language, for resilience and portability, and also are fully compliant with all relevant standards. In relation to the web-based modules, the applications use HTTP for transport functionality, HTML for delivering the payload contents and XML & XSLT for data structuring and presentation, so that the system is scalable and easy to customise to the needs of each individual client. In relation to the telephony functionality, the applications use the SIP protocol for session initiation, and fully supports connectivity via VoIP, ISDN and analogue devices.
First Contact products can be deployed in “stand-alone” mode and “network” mode. “In the Office”, for example, can be deployed via a stand-alone PC connected to a pair of touch-screens. “On the Street” can be deployed with scripted dialogues embedded in the mobile device itself. Where functionality and content are served from a server on a network, the applications are designed to be lightweight, so that server processing and network communication is as efficient as possible.
