Advanced user interfaces in traffic information systems

This article summarizes recent works on two advanced user interfaces for traffic information systems, which are expected to support the future amount of users accessing daily for the information. Natural language processing technology has been applied in two ways. First, automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis are integrated in a telephone call center in order to automatically retrieve call voices and provide voice information over telephones. Second, a question-answering system, developed on the widely-used instant messenger, is applied to provide traffic information over the computer network. Case studies in deploying the systems during traffic-congested occasions are also briefly reported.