European citizens and public bodies will be able to access and update any eGovernment information by Voice and Graphics in their own languagee
18 Companies from 8 European countries are teaming up in the SAFIR consortium.
A European Commission 6th Framework Programme
Supported Integrated Project
Brussels, 17th March 2004 - A new technology-based initiative has been launched to promote the easy flow of information in the various languages within the European Union. SAFIR - Speech Automatic Friendly Interface Research - will create an innovative paradigm in interface technology combining Voice and Graphics to give each citizen, public organization and private body an equal opportunity to access and interact with existing
eGovernment information at any time through common devices such as TV, wired devices (such as PC) and wireless devices (such as Tablet PC/PDA/GSM) by voice recognition, using their preferred language.
The Project commenced on March the 1st 2004, will last for 48 months and is funded with 6.8 M€ from the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme (Information Society Technologies).
The SAFIR context :
Modern democracies are facing a growing number of information challenges, including :
- How to inform citizens ?
- How to offer an equal opportunity to both Internet literate & Internet illiterate citizens ?
- How to provide access to existing data ?
- How to maintain these data, and keep them up to date?
- How to collect information in an efficient and easy way ?
- How to demonstrate that the administration is really a service for the citizens ?
At the same time, governmental services, such as field employees, police, fire brigades, civil protection agents at all levels (national, regional, municipal) are facing a similar problem when operating in the field.
SAFIR's objectives :
The primary objective of SAFIR is to give each European citizen an equal opportunity to access, update and manage existing authorized content through common easy-to-use devices by the means of the most obvious and simplest human interface: voice and graphics.
It will also allow civil servants to gather, update and manage information in the field by using voice activated mobile devices.
The benefits of SAFIR :
- Administrative paper based work will be decreased
- Work flows and work methods of public bodies will be improved
- General efficiency will increase
- The digital divide will be decreased
- Governments will interact more closely with their citizens
- Europe will be better positioned in the race for a user-friendly "Knowledge Society"
The SAFIR project consists of :
- Analysis of the gap between proposed IT solutions and potential administration and user benefits
- The development of the techniques and methodologies to allow multimodal access with auto adaptation of the devices to the users
- The definition of generic needs of an eGovernment interface and extraction of relevant information to create a generic eGovernment "domain" for the natural language layer of SAFIR
- The development of the technique and methodologies to easily build and maintain content by multimodal means (voice + graphics)
- The development of the techniques and methodologies to tackle multiple language content
User pilots will prove and enrich the developed techniques and methodologies; these pilot users will be the early adopters preparing for future dissemination, in different sub-domains:
- Citizens
- Municipal employees
- Fire brigade and civil protection
- Police and civil security organizations
Results will be techniques, software and procedures to enable up to date data to be used by citizens and special users, including multimodal automatic adaptations and preferences, in a multilingual Europe.
Equally new methodologies based on those techniques will allow specific classes of workers (civil protection, police, regional government, policy-makers…) to increase the quality of data and services to the citizens by immediately accessing the digital chain in the field.
Pilots with various early adopters from European Regions (Brussels, Vratsa, Walloon…) will ensure the practical dissemination of the SAFIR results while international cooperation is already planned and scheduled.
Project Partners :
SAFIR Project Web Site :
http://www.safir-fp6.net or http://www.safir-fp6.org
PowerPoint presentations from the press launch, press releases, photos, … are available on this website.
European Commission eGovernment website & contact:
http://europa.eu.int/egovernment_research
EC-egovernment-research@cec.eu.int
+32 (0)2 296 41 14
Press Contacts :
European Public Relations :
