The first prototype of the H2020 European Project KRISTINA was presented in November 2016 in Tübingen (Germany) as a virtual agent, able to talk and interact with users in controlled conditions. The first European virtual assistant in the field of healthcare understands and speaks Spanish, German and Polish, and has a proper voice and aspect.

The goal of the KRISTINA project is to develop technological solutions to help overcoming migrants' language and cultural barriers in healthcare and geriatric services in their host countries. With the first prototype, KRISTINA becomes a conversation partner. Technical partners are constantly working in order to ensure a natural interaction with the agent, improving its expressions and its ability to recognize and interpret content, emotions and human feelings. The first prototype has been successfully tested. It demonstrates the current state-of-the-art in spoken dialogue interaction by means of a fully functional integrated platform.

For the first prototype, Vocapia developed real-time speech-to-text solutions adapted to the KRISTINA domain in Spanish, German and Polish. Extensive development work has been carried out to improve accuracy by 10% absolute in average since the beginning of the project. The novel real-time systems can produce speech transcriptions with small latency delays (less than 0.7 second in average).

At the present stage, KRISTINA is able to interact with users within pre-defined scopes, responding to questions about health assistance, advising on specific health issues or reading newspaper articles. Research and development will continue to enable the agent to hold conversations on a larger variety of topics, to provide responses at real-time, to recognize emotions, face expressions and body gestures, as well as to adapt itself to the user's cultural context. For the next prototypes, support will be extended to Turkish and Arabic.

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: http://kristina-project.eu/en/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/projectKRISTINA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/projectKRISTINa
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12003450

Vocapia Research is a French R&D company and software publisher with over 20 years of experience in providing leading edge speech technologies for many languages, including most major European 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 decades of research at LISN, with which there is a privileged partnership. Joint systems developed with LISN have achieved top ranks in national and international challenges on speech-to-text transcription. Located at the heart of the science innovation cluster of Paris Saclay, France, Vocapia Research is a leader in developing and adapting AI-based solutions for both civil and defence applications. These applications include audio and audiovisual data mining (broadcast and web data, telephone speech), production of subtitles, OSINT and COMINT, and the analysis of aeronautical communications (air traffic control, voice command). 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.