Technologies for Voice Portal Platform

The voice user interface is an important tool for realizing natural, easy-to-use humancomputer interfaces that can bridge the digital-divide. This paper gives an overview of voice interface applications and information access systems that operate over a telephone network. It also introduces some voice portal solutions that use speech recognition/synthesis and dialogue control and outlines the speech processing technologies used in voice portal solutions. The developers of a voice portal system must understand the characteristics of speech and ensure that the speech recognition part can cope with interjections, background noise, and the distortions caused by telephone lines. Speech synthesis produces natural speech and other speech styles by using a corpus-based method and automatically constructing a waveform database. The information services of municipal offices, traffic information services, stock price services, and so on are widely expected to incorporate voice portal systems in the near future.