Natural language call steering for service applications

In this paper, a dialogue system for natural language based call steering is described and studied. The system is based on natural language speech recognition and understanding within a mixed initiative dialogue. The system is implemented on Bell Labs. Speech Technology Integration Platform (BLSTIP) using dialogue and natural language understanding components from BT laboratories. A prototype system in the operator service domain [2] is described. In order to improve the acoustic and language modeling for natural language based dialogue applications, various approaches are described and studied. The structure of the dialogue manager is also presented in which mixed-initiative dialogue can be supported with efficiency. Call classification and steering experiments were performed. The results confirm the efficacy of the proposed approach.