On the development of telephone applications: some practical issues and evaluation

This paper describes the major problems encountered during the development of two automatic services delivered through the telephone platform reported in [1]. Service specification, system design and development, and service evaluation and tuning will be described. Given an initial set of user trials, a significant part of the work was devoted to the refinement of the language models (actually a combination of both regular grammars and tri-grams). System performance has been evaluated with different sets of acoustic models, including both context independent and context dependent phone models.