A prototype of speech interface based on the Google Cloud Platform to access a semantic website

Abstract

The main restriction of the Semantic Web is the difficulty of the SPARQL language, which is necessary for extracting information from the Knowledge Representation also known as ontology. Making the Semantic Web accessible for people who do not know SPARQL is essential for the use of friendlier interfaces, and a good alternative is Natural Language. This paper shows the implementation of a friendly prototype interface activated by voice to query and retrieving information from websites built with Semantic Web tools. In that way, the end users avoid the complicated SPARQL language. To achieve this, the interface recognizes a speech query and converts it into text, it processes the text through a Java program and identifies keywords, generates a SPARQL query, extracts the information from the website and reads it in a voice for the user. In our work, Google Cloud Speech API makes Speech-to-Text conversions and Text-to Speech conversions are made with SVOX Pico. As a result, we have measured three variables: the success rate in queries, the response time of query and a usability survey. The values of the variables allow the evaluation of our prototype. Finally, the interface proposed provides us with a new approach in the problem, using the Cloud like a Service, reducing barriers of access to the Semantic Web for people without technical knowledge of Semantic Web technologies.