Complexity and Usability of Voice-Enabled Alerting and Situational Reporting Decoupled Systems

Abstract

Telephone calls are the predominant telecommunication mode in Sri Lanka (Zainudeen et al). Leveraging low cost voice-based applications for disaster communication would be acceptable and sustainable. The findings in this paper are from an experiment concerning interactive voice for connecting community-based emergency field operatives with their central emergency coordination hub. Challenge was in interchanging the Freedom Fone (FF) Interactive Voice Response (IVR) generated, Sinhala and Tamil language speech data with the text-based ’Sahana’ disaster management system for analysis and decision support. Human interactions with the two decoupled software systems to accomplish the sequence of tasks, point to instabilities. Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL), a XML-based, interoperable content standard was adopted for mediation between the two disparate systems. Low quality voice data resulting in incomplete information was a barrier to automating transformations between the FF IVR and Sahana. Replacing these processes with human procedures significantly degrades the reliability. This paper discusses the complexities, usability and utility shortcomings discovered through controlled-exercises, in Sri Lanka.