Abstract
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.
Biography
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.