A spoken dialog system for the Dutch public transport information service

In the Netherlands there is a nationwide premium rate telephone number that can be dialed to obtain information about various forms of public transport. In t996 this number was called more than twelve million times. Human operators managed to handle only about nine million of these calls. In order to answer more of these calls, a spoken dialog system was developed to automate part of this service. The automation component concerns information about journeys between two train stations. The starting point of our research was an existing German information system. This system was ported to Dutch. A bootstrapping method was used to collect the data, which in turn were used to improve the system itself.