Clarissa Explains it All

A screen shot of the Clarissa software - this procedure is for in-flight coliform detection in water. CREDIT: NASA

Many tasks astronauts perform on the International Space Station (ISS) are tedious, long and too complicated to do from memory. Often an astronaut needs to be read instructions by another person, or constantly switch his attention from the task at hand to a laptop computer displaying a PDF of the instructions, to work.

Both of the current methods have their disadvantages. One requires two people where only one is necessary; the other involves a floating laptop and the potential to lose the pieces of whatever is being worked on.

Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center felt they had a solution to this problem: a speech-powered virtual assistant. Using suggestions from astronauts, they developed Clarissa, the first spoken dialogue system in space, to provide crew members a hands-free means of getting technical instructions.

Clarissa's parents believe that she will greatly improve the efficiency of some of the longer tasks performed by crewmembers, including analyzing potable water and routine check-ups of the space suits.

At present, the program understands about 500 words, said John Dowding, a senior scientist on the project. Clarissa understands about 75 vocal commands - such as "go forward" or "go back" - related to reading procedures. Should she recommend the wrong step or misrecognize a command, astronauts can correct her by saying "undo" or "no, I said go to ..." and then say the step they wish to hear.

Clarissa is included in the standard software package included in each of the ISS client laptops, said Dowding. Astronauts only need to connect a noise-canceling headset to the laptop to use the program. There has been work done in the past to incorporate speech-recognition software like Clarissa into a proposed Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA), an orb-shaped robot that would hover aboard the station, working with the astronauts like a personal roving laptop.

Manny Rayner, a senior consultant on the project, is not optimistic about Clarissa's future as an add-on to a PSA. "In principle, it would be easy to make Clarissa accessible through the PSA, but my feeling is that it will never happen."

Clarissa was delivered to the ISS on Dec. 25, 2004 onboard the Progress 16 supply ship and installed shortly after. However, the program has yet not been tested in space, and the test date was pushed back due in part to the current crew spending time on station repairs and preparing for spacewalks.

Although the system hasn't been tested in space, its developers are confident it will work based on successful test runs on Earth. Three quarters of the astronauts who have tried out Clarissa liked the technology, according to Rayner.

Since Clarissa's developers planned to set her up on the International Space Station (ISS), the team "went looking for names that had 'ISS' in them," said Dowding. "There aren't many of those. Clarissa won out," Rayner told Space.com, adding that the team thought a woman's name would make the system sound friendly.