Applied Language Technologies (ALTech) has been developing and
deploying a number of large-scale speech recognition systems for
telephone-based transactions and services. The applications include
enhanced Yellow Pages for a phone company, a flight reservation system for
a major airline, and a stock quote system for an electronic brokerage
company.
The deployment of these application presented a number of technical
challenges, including barge-in, very large vocabularies, and large numbers
of simultaneous callers. In order to make these systems successful,
we have also had to solve difficult user-interface problems. In
particular, these systems must support first-time and occasional users
who need to be guided through the interface, as well as expert users
who need to be able to quickly perform the functions they desire.
In this talk, I will describe these applications in more detail, and
talk about our approach and solutions to these technical and
user-interface issues.
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Michael Phillips is the Vice-President of Engineering and co-founder
of Applied Language Technologies (ALTech). Before starting ALTech in
1994, Mr. Phillips was a research scientist in MIT's Spoken Language
Systems Group where he was responsible for many aspects of the
development of Summit, MIT's segment-based speech recognition system,
including acoustic modeling, lexical access, and integration with
natural language constraints. Prior to joining the group at MIT in
1987, he worked on speech recognition at Carnegie-Mellon University
and Scott Instruments Corp.