DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE AUTOMATION IN BELL-CANADA - TRIAL RESULTS

Speech recognition was used to automate directory assistance in a 6-mo nth trial with Bell Canada's public customers. The bilingual applicati on gave the caller a choice at the beginning of the dialog to continue in English or French. Over 89% of calls were either partially or full y automated. Customer and operator reactions to the system were positi ve. Bell-Northern Research's flexible vocabulary recognizer, using a v ocabulary of 1,700 city names and synonyms, performed well under real world conditions. Economically significant operator work time savings were demonstrated.