ASR AND TTS TELECOMMUNICATIONS APPLICATIONS IN JAPAN

This paper first describes recent trends of ASR and TTS telecommunicat ions applications in Japan. ASR applications focus on public services such as operator automation, operator assistance, voice-activated info rmation retrieval, and voice dialing. Major TTS applications include i nformation service by voice and e-mail reading. The usage of ASR and T TS functions is expected to dramatically increase in the near future w ith the penetration of handy and mobile telephone terminals; hot topic s are text broadcasting and digital communication. Secondly this paper describes NTT's experimental interactive system featuring (1) highly accurate speaker independent and large vocabulary speech recognition b ased on context-dependent accurate acoustic phoneme HMM models trained with speech data from more than 10,000 speakers collected over teleph one network, (2) high quality text-to-speech synthesis that generates speech by concatenating triphone-context-dependent waveform segments, (3) software-based configuration that requires no special hardware exc ept a PC equipped with a sound board and a voice modem, and (4) easy a nd rapid prototyping which enables the developer to build a system by writing some types of service scenarios. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V .