It’s not a surprise that speech recognition has brought a whole new collection of applications. Nowadays, speech recognition is used by doctors, lawyers and security professionals. The purpose of this is to ensure that the daily life and work of people become considerably easier than it used to be. As of technology today, we may not be able to establish direct human interaction with our mobile devices, but we talk to them a lot. Speech recognition is progressing quickly and will become even more advanced than it is now. The project will explore the diversity of features, mainly speech recognition, provided by the Android platform and how they can be used to aid with user interaction to deliver a quick and efficient booking application. An extensive research will be carried out regarding design patterns and guidelines to aid the implementation of this application. Additionally, the application could also be used for other scenarios involving more organisations such as the medical field for reserving appointments with doctors.
The aim of the project is to develop a native application based on Android platform. Since it will be native, it will allow the developer to have access to the core functionality of the mobile hardware such as being able to alert the user while the application is turned off- a feature that hybrid and web-only applications cannot provide.
The main purpose is to allow students to quickly and efficiently book university resources using speech commands. The application would only ask for a 1-time login, communicate with an external database to store the data and provide an excellent interface which would allow quick booking within few clicks.
It will include useful features such as a reminder that alerts the user based on a specific time before the booking date and to further reduce the time required to make a booking, it contains a preferences feature that remembers previous booked resources.
Most universities/institutions offer a web-based mobile application that allows users to book and use resources such as meeting rooms, PCs, and group study rooms across different locations at a specific location. However, it is often time-consuming to reserve resources due to the nature of the application mostly being web-only. For instance, to use SHUGo Android application used to book resources for Sheffield Hallam University, the user would need to click on the mobile application which is simply a link to a website on the browser. Through the browser, the user needs to login with a username and a password to access the GUI which is difficult to navigate . This process can be eliminated into fewer steps using a native Android application: the entry to the application, login/registration, GUI navigation and the initialisation of speech recognition feature, such as the click of a button.
A large part of the inspiration for this application- the ability to combine the development of a pure native application with a speech recognition pattern to achieve tasks is very satisfying.
The application will also take modern approaches inspired by popular Android applications such as adhering to strict UI patterns and design guidelines to deliver a user-friendly interface that users won’t find difficult to use and should find appealing.