ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1991
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1991

A recognition / synthesis system applied to database access through the telephone network

Filipe N. Carlos, Jose P. Carmona, Pedro M. Chagas, Luis C. Oliveira, Antonio J. Serralheiro, Isabel M. Trancoso

This paper describes a prototype of a recognition / synthesis system in the Portuguese language. The system was designed to demonstrate an application of the voice-driven database type, consisting of queries to a database installed in a remote computer accessed by the public telephone network. The selected application is a telephone directory service, in which the user requests the telephone number of a subscriber by indicating his first and last names, and the system asks for confirmation of the recognized names before returning the desired information. If requested, a telephone call is made to that particular telephone number. The recognition of the requested names uses a classical DTW technique, and the confirmation software synthesizes the recognized names on the basis of their pre-stored phonetic description, using phoneme concatenation. Preliminary tests with the system show the large potential of this type of applications. Keywords: recognition, DTW, text-to-speech synthesis, phoneme concatenation, voice-driven database