Vocapia is participating in the EC project Kristina "A Knowledge-Based Information Agent with Social Competence and Human Interaction Capabilities". The project is funded under the ICT Research and Innovation action Multimodal and Natural Computer Interaction of the European Union Horizon 2020 research programme. Kristina started in March 2015 and will run for a period of 3 years.

The main objectives of the Kristina project are to carry out research in order to develop technologies for a human-like socially competent and communicative agent running on mobile communication devices that serves as a trusted information provider and mediator for questions related to basic care and healthcare. The targeted population are migrants, who face language and cultural barriers in their host countries.

Vocapia will work on developing speech technologies that will be used in a mobile, multimodal agent able to conduct an informed, flexible spoken language dialogue with the user. The agent will be capable of understanding and correctly interpreting the concerns of the user expressed by a combination of facial, gestural and verbal signals in varied, culturally influenced circumstances. The technologies will be validated in a series of use cases, for which prolonged trials will be carried out to assess the prototype marking the termination of a software development cycle. The subjects will be a representative number of migrants recruited from the migration circles identified as especially in need in two European countries: elderly Turkish migrants and their relatives; and short term Polish care-giving personnel in Germany; and North African migrants in Spain.

Vocapia's partners in Kristina are:

• Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain;
• Sociedad Española de Medicina de Familia y Comunitaria, Spain;
• Almende BV, Netherlands;
• Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece;
• University of Augsburg, Germany;
• Universität Tübingen, Germany;
• Universität Ulm, Germany;
• Deutsches Rotes Kreuz, Kreisverband Tübingen, Germany.

Project website: kristina-project.eu

Vocapia Research, founded in July 2000, is an R&D company and software publisher developing and providing leading edge speech technologies and solutions for many languages, including most major European Union languages as well as Arabic, Mandarin, and Russian. The Vocapia Research VoxSigma^® software suite uses advanced language technologies such as language identification, speech recognition, and speaker identification to transform raw audio and audiovisual data into structured and searchable XML documents. This technology relies on over 25 years of research at LIMSI-CNRS, with which there is a priviledged partnership. Joint systems developed with LIMSI have achieved top ranks in national and international challenges of speech-to-text transcription. The most common applications of the VoxSigma software suite are audio and audiovisual data mining (broadcast data, podcasts, call center data), media monitoring, and media asset management. Vocapia Research is located in the scientific pole of the Saclay Plateau, France. Readers who wish to get more information about Vocapia Research are invited to check out the Vocapia Research website or use the contact information page http://www.vocapia.com/contact.