Lightbend > 实例探究 > Primetalk Uses Typesafe to Power Speech Portal

Primetalk Uses Typesafe to Power Speech Portal

公司规模

Startup

国家

Worldwide

产品

Speech Portal
Typesafe Platform
Akka Concurrency Framework
SynapseGrid

技术栈

Scala
Akka
Java

实施规模

Pilot projects

影响指标

Digital Expertise
Innovation Output
Productivity Improvements

技术

分析与建模 - 自然语言处理 (NLP)
平台即服务 (PaaS) - 应用开发平台
应用基础设施与中间件 - 事件驱动型应用

适用行业

Software
电信

适用功能

产品研发
商业运营

用例

语音识别
远程协作
远程控制

服务

软件设计与工程服务
系统集成

关于客户

Primetalk is a new venture in the natural language processing field, focusing on developing spoken dialog systems that offer flexible, interactive, user-initiative dialogs as a human-computer interface for diverse information systems. The company aims to replace the awkward interactive voice response systems (IVR) with user-friendly spoken dialog systems (SDS). Despite being a new player in the field, Primetalk boasts a highly qualified team with substantial experience in software development and scientific research. The team has two years of experience with Scala, over ten years of experience in Enterprise Java development and project management, and five years of scientific research in spoken dialog systems. Primetalk's Speech Portal is a platform for building spoken dialog systems, including components for speech processing and an artificial intelligence layer that enables the dialog system to think and learn. The company's mission is to create a new stack that allows the creation of flexible user-initiative dialogs, addressing the limitations of existing VoiceXML applications that lead to rigid system-driven dialogs.

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挑战

The goal of Primetalk is to create a completely new stack that allows the creation of flexible user-initiative dialogs. However, this goal is challenging due to several factors. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a complex field requiring interdisciplinary knowledge in artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, aural physiology, signal processing, computational linguistics, probability theory, and mathematical statistics. Additionally, automatic, large vocabulary continuous speech recognition is a heavy load task that benefits from parallelism, but implementing parallelism is non-trivial. The dynamic event-driven nature of real-time dialog handling presents another challenge, as many events need immediate handling by the dialog logic. These events can include recognition results, audible user interventions, timers, telephony, and system playback. Furthermore, simultaneous playback of different audible media and parallel conversations with multiple participants add to the complexity. Scalability is also a concern, as real-world demand requires handling many channels by a single application instance with zero administration. The initial version of the Primetalk Speech Portal, developed with Java concurrency, faced several drawbacks, including memory leaks, error-prone communication between threads, limited scalability, and unexpected runtime errors due to incomplete configurations.

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解决方案

Primetalk sought a better solution and found it in Typesafe’s Akka Concurrency Framework. Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant event-driven applications on the JVM. Primetalk implemented a pilot project with Akka in Java and found it promising. They also evaluated the Scala programming language during the Akka pilot and were impressed with its capabilities. Scala is a general-purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns concisely, elegantly, and type-safely. Primetalk then implemented another pilot with Akka in Scala, and the results were so favorable that they decided to base their system on it. Scala and Akka provided Primetalk with the opportunity to rapidly create robust and scalable applications. The separation between state and thread pool in Akka eliminates memory leaks, and immutable data processing excludes locking completely. Functional programming encourages the creation of reusable components, and scalability is perfect as adding more channels does not affect the thread-pool size. The Cake Pattern in Scala allows early detection of configuration problems, reducing runtime errors. As part of their work, Primetalk open-sourced a framework named “SynapseGrid,” a function integration framework that connects ordinary Scala functions into a system by declaring the directed graph of interconnections. SynapseGrid allows flexible function composition, strictly typed message handling in Akka actors, and easy implementation of multiple input/multiple output functions.

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运营影响

The transition to the Typesafe Platform has provided Primetalk with a strong foundation for building a new generation, scalable, and robust dialog management platform.
The newest release of Speech Portal has many desirable properties, including elastic-scale on multichannel requirements, flexible integration of natural speech processing components, and parallelism of automatic speech recognition.
The dialog manager supports dynamic real-time dialogs, and the real-time mixer can handle many media sources switched in real time.
Stateless functional processing leads to almost zero debugging, and the system is resilient to exceptions both in the Speech Portal and in custom dialog logic.
The use of Scala and Akka has enabled Primetalk to create robust and scalable applications rapidly, with perfect scalability and early detection of configuration problems.

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