Preuve de concept d'un bot vocal dialoguant en wolof
This is an incremental development for Orange customers in Senegal, addressing language accessibility in voice technology.
The paper tackles the problem of building an automatic voice assistant for Wolof, the main vehicular language in Senegal, to provide information about Orange's loyalty program, achieving 22% WER for ASR and 78% F1-score for NLU.
This paper presents the proof-of-concept of the first automatic voice assistant ever built in Wolof language, the main vehicular language spoken in Senegal. This voicebot is the result of a collaborative research project between Orange Innovation in France, Orange Senegal (aka Sonatel) and ADNCorp, a small IT company based in Dakar, Senegal. The purpose of the voicebot is to provide information to Orange customers about the Sargal loyalty program of Orange Senegal by using the most natural mean to communicate: speech. The voicebot receives in input the customer's oral request that is then processed by a SLU system to reply to the customer's request using audio recordings. The first results of this proof-of-concept are encouraging as we achieved 22\% of WER for the ASR task and 78\% of F1-score on the NLU task.