Initial Development Towards a Trilingual Speech Interface for Financial Information Inquiries

Abstract

This paper describes our initial effort in developing a trilingual speech interface for financial information inquiries. Our foreign exchange inquiry system consists of: (i) monolingual and trilingual speech recognizers, which receive the user's spoken input in the form of microphone speech; (ii) a real-time data capture component which continuously updates a relational database from a financial data satellite feed; and (iii) a trilingual speech generation component, which generates English and Chinese text based on the raw financial data. The generated text is then transformed into spoken presentations. English text is processed by the FESTIVAL synthesizer system. Chinese text is sent to our syllable-based synthesizer, which employs a concatenative resequencing technique to produce spoken presentations in Putonghua or Cantonese. The speech interface is augmented with a visual display which aims to provide feedback to the user at all times during an interaction. Within the restricted scope of foreign exchange (FOREX), our recognition performance accuracies remain above 93%. Confusions across languages contributed significantly to our recognition errors, but most are confusions between the same currency/country names spoken in different languages. These errors are not detrimental with respect to data retrieval. Our concatenative re-sequencing technique reports the date, time and exchange rates of the input currency pair. A demonstration can be found at http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/hccl/demos/.