Fig. 1: Melvin’s architecture supports multi-modal responses to common cancer genomics queries.
From: Melvin is a conversational voice interface for cancer genomics data
a Engaging Melvin through an Alexa-enabled device, a user has already expressed two attributes of interest – a CANCER TYPE (breast cancer) and a DATA TYPE (mutations). Next, the user expresses a GENE (TP53). The user’s voice utterance is captured by the device and sent to Alexa Skills Service. b The transcribed query is received by the Melvin Intent Handler (1) which calls the Out-of-vocabulary Mapper Service (OOVMS) (2) to map the utterance to a supported attribute. The navigation state is updated (3) based on the identified attribute type (GENE) and its value (TP53). The updated navigation state (breast cancer, mutations, and TP53) dictates the real-time analysis request, which is sent to the Data Explorer Service (4). c Computed results are sent to the Intent Handler where speech and graphical responses are generated and relayed back to the user. GDC Genomic Data Commons, TCGA The Cancer Genome Atlas, NCBI National Center for Biotechnology Information.
