Interactive voice technology at work: The CSELT experience

Abstract

This paper is a survey of the speech technologies and applications developed at CSELT, some of which are employed in real services deployed in the Italian telephone network. With the rise of significant speech recognition and text-to-speech applications, the activity of our lab encompasses now a broader set of activities, from new algorithmic approaches to speech product engineering and application development. In particular, the paper gives an overview of the products originated from our speech technology research. It describes two operative applications, namely a voice dialing service for large name directories, which is installed in the CSELT PABX, and an automated network service for directory assistance, which is now accessible to all the Italian telephone customers.