Speech Understanding and Dialogue over the telephone: an overview of the ESPRIT SUNDIAL project

One of the most obvious and natural applications for speech technology is in providing a gateway to information services over the telephone network. Already a significant growth is occurring the provision of information from a centralised computing system using stored messages or synthetic speech derived from text files. Most of these systems however currently rely on the use of touch tone input for selection of the information. In the UK only 15% of homes and businesses have tone dialling, although the network is currently able to support around 50% tone dialling. The ability to recognise a small number of words or even the digits without the user requiring to train the system therefore has widespread application. As the scope of the information service expands so also does the need for more intelligent dialogues with much larger vocabularies for speech understanding.