2014 Olympics: how to help a foreigner cope with the Russian language


    On September 17 in Sochi, together with MegaFon, we presented a program of linguistic support for the future Olympics. The ultimate goal of this program is to make foreign guests of the 2014 Olympics comfortable in the city and to be able to freely communicate in any situation, regardless of what language they speak. Until recently, such a project could have seemed absolutely impossible: after all, you can’t attach a personal translator to each of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners. But today this task, which could not be solved before even with huge material investments, can be successfully solved with the help of modern technologies. Under the cut, we will talk about what we came up with for the Olympics, with technical details for fans.

    So, the main task is to ensure comfortable communication of foreign guests at the Olympics. Traditional methods:

    - transfer all signs, pointers and menus in the city,
    - issue localized maps and guides,
    - collect all potentially useful reference information (schedules, transport routes, addresses and phone numbers of institutions, institutions and services) into a single database and transfer it into the main languages
    - to organize the work of translators in service centers and at major events.

    All this will be in Sochi.



    However, it is obvious that these measures do not allow to completely eliminate the language barriers. A foreigner at the Olympics will have to communicate with people, for example, a taxi driver, a doctor, a policeman, just a person on the street. Finally, in many situations where you need to quickly obtain information, it is more convenient to call the information desk and ask than to look for it in maps or guidebooks.

    To help the guests of the Olympics in such situations, together with MegaFon, we are launching a multilingual information and call center that will support 8-10 languages ​​(English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Russian ) With its help, foreign guests can in their native or understandable language:

    - get any background information about city institutions, tourist and other objects;
    - order goods or services, for example: book a hotel room or plane tickets, call a taxi, order delivery of dinner or medicine, etc .;
    - quickly contact the ambulance service, the police, the Ministry of Emergencies and other emergency services;
    - easy to navigate in the city, having received the necessary information about timetables or public transport routes;
    - And, of course, by calling the call center, a foreign tourist will be able to use the services of an online translator in any situation when it is needed.

    For the work of remote operators-translators when building a call center, the IPJ telephony platform ASTJ was used, this is a specialized platform of ABBYY Language Services, created to provide on-demand telephone interpreter services (we wrote about this here ). The platform allows you to implement dynamic IVR applications and flexible call routing. The application for the translation service identifies the subscriber and, based on the data from his profile and the parameters entered by him, constructs a call processing and distribution script for the translator.

    The ASTJ platform provides the ability to quickly deploy and scale, it implements the ability to work in the "multisite" mode - when several telephone servers work in an integrated group, sharing a common pool of agents and queues. Each of the servers included in the cluster can be virtual, and in fact we use just such a configuration, since it is more reliable and convenient to maintain. Servers are running CentOS.

    The exact load that the call center will have during the Olympics is not known, which means that it will be necessary to provide technologically and organizationally the opportunity to greatly increase the number of operators and processed calls. The architecture of the call-center allows you to vary the resources of translators several times in two weeks. According to various estimates, the required number of operators with knowledge of foreign languages ​​(without language separation) varies from 30-50 (at night and normal daytime) to 1500-2000 (during the opening and closing of the Games).

    Another component of the program is the ABBYY iSochi mobile application for iOS and Android platforms, which will help Sochi guests to navigate the city on their own. The application provides convenient access to the call center and allows you to quickly connect a professional translator to any conversation. ABBYY iSochi also contains useful reference information for a successful orientation in the city.

    One of the interesting features of the application is the automatic determination of the user's language by the language settings of the phone (with the ability to change the language manually). During each call, the program automatically sends this information to the call center, and the user is answered in a language that he understands. The application allows you to select the type of call (a call to a call center for help, an emergency call, a taxi or transfer by phone) and determines the coordinates of the caller (if the smartphone on which the application is running has a GPS receiver). As a result, a user from Japan just needs to click on the “Taxi” button, and he will immediately get to the call center operator who speaks Japanese, knows that the call was made specifically with the purpose of ordering a taxi, and, in addition, he sees the location on the map the caller.

    Directly from the iSochi shell, it will be possible to install other ABBYY mobile programs that make life easier in a foreign country - ABBYY Lingvo , ABBYY TextGrabber , ABBYY Business Card Reader .

    Technical details for fans


    The application transmits data (language, type of calls, coordinates and authorization parameters) by sending a POST request via HTTP to a web server. The web server (Nginx + Perl (Mojolicious + Starman) + MySQL) processes the received parameters, identifies the user in the system, saves the data in the database and gives the application an answer, after which the application initiates a call to the call center. In the tests performed, processing the request on the server side took no more than 30-40 ms. In addition, there are several more scenarios in which the application accesses the web server (for example, a balance request for accessing paid services or changing personal data), the responses are returned in the form of JSON structures.

    The web component of the solution is scalable due to the fact that the Nginx frontend can be configured to distribute incoming requests by an arbitrary number of backends, each backend is a real or virtual machine under FreeBSD running prefork daemons (using Starman as a loader , the framework Mojolicious ) with constantly open database connections (using DBIx :: Connector ). You can run up to (N - 1) daemons on the server, where N is the number of available physical and logical cores. The number of virtual machines can grow quite quickly.

    The call center, having received an incoming call, requests the availability of information on this subscriber in the database. If he finds information received from the application, then the call is processed based on these parameters - the system selects the most suitable operator / translator and establishes a connection. Calls with the “emergency call” type are given priority.

    In the future, it is planned to use binary replication to maintain the required number of database replicas containing relatively slowly changing information so that the call center server clusters access their “own” replicas, removing the vast majority of the load from the master database.

    In a scheme with several clusters, an incoming call via SIP-protocol is distributed to one of the clusters (so far just uniformly), the number of clusters can be quite arbitrary provided that they have a sufficient number of database replicas.

    Processing information takes 30-40 milliseconds on the side of the web server, plus up to 100 milliseconds on the passage of packets and a few milliseconds on the side of the call center. This allows you to use such a scheme in telephony, working in real time.
    All the main components of the linguistic support program for the Olympics in Sochi - a multilingual reference database, call center and iSochi application - are closely integrated. As a result, for the Olympics, we will launch a unique service that has no analogues in the world so far. We hope that this service will make Sochi truly comfortable for the stay of foreign guests.

    Well, in conclusion, we say that this entire project does not require additional funding from the state, since all innovative solutions are implemented at the expense of partners (ABBYY and MegaFon).


    Sochi Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak at a presentation on the Olympic language support program

    Egor Zaikin,

    ABBYY Language Services

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