Abstract The commercial viability of automating large scale directory assistance is shown by presenting new results on the recognition of large numbers of different names. Satisfactory recognition performance is achieved by employing a stochastic combination of N-best lists retrieved from multiple user utterances with the telephone database as an additional knowledge source. The strategy is used in a prototype of a fully automated directory information system which is designed to cover a whole country: After the city has been selected, the user is asked for first and last name of the desired person and, if necessary, also for the street or a spelling of the last name. Confidence measures are used for an optimal dialogue flow.

This paper addresses the problem of building natural language based grammars and language models for directory assistance applications that use automatic speech recognition. As input, one is given an electronic version of a standard phone book, and the output is a grammar or language model that will accept all the ways in which one might ask for a particular listing. We focus primarily on the problem of processing listings for businesses and government offices, but our techniques can be used to speech-enable other kinds of large listings (like book titles, catalog entries, etc.). We have applied these techniques to the business listings of a state in the Midwestern United States, and we present highly encouraging recognition results. 1.

In the future, the world of telecommunications will be vastly different than it is today. The driving force will be the seamless integration of real-time communications (e.g., voice, video, music, etc.) and data into a single network, with ubiquitous access to that network anywhere, anytime, and by a wide range of devices. The only currently available ubiquitous access device to the network is the telephone, and the only ubiquitous user access technology mode is spoken voice commands and natural language dialogues with machines. In the future, new access devices and modes will augment speech in this role, but are unlikely to supplant the telephone and access by speech anytime soon. Speech technologies have progressed to the point where they are now viable for a broad range of communications services, including compression of speech for use over wired and wireless networks; speech synthesis, recognition, and understanding for dialogue access to information, people, and messaging; and speaker verification for secure access to information and services. This paper provides brief overviews of these technologies, discusses some of the unique properties of wireless, plain old telephone service, and Internet protocol networks that make voice communication and control problematic, and describes the types of voice services available in the past and today, and those that we foresee becoming available over the next several years. Keywords—Dialogue management, speaker recognition, speech coding, speech processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken language understanding. I.

[A look at the technology, the technological challenges, and the solutions] Voice search is the technology underlying many spoken dialog systems