Multilinguality in voice activated information services: The P502 EURESCOM project

Abstract

The paper describes the multilingual system developed within the framework of the P502 EURESCOM project. The system described provides information about major telephone services available in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Portugal in five languages. We present the results of a number of experiments carried out in the five countries, aiming to try and answer some fundamental questions concerned with the exploitation of a multilingual service. Both technological and interface design issues have been investigated and several alternatives have been tested. We compared speech recognition accuracy and successful transaction completion rates of GSM and PSTN networks, and evaluated cross-country and cross-language effects. Using a new methodological approach to assessment, a powerful predictive model was developed. This model allowed users’ subjective ratings to be predicted from objective measurements. The results showed that an average Transaction Success rate of more than 92% was obtained when speech recognisers exhibiting good Word Recognition Accuracy were coupled to suitable dialogue interfaces in the IVR system.