Multilinguality in voice activated information services: The P502 EURESCOMproject

The paper describes the multilingual system developed within the framework of the P502 EURESCOM project. The system described provides information abo ut major telephone services available in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Portugal in five languages. We present the results of a number of experime nts carried out in the five countries, aiming to try and answer some fundam ental questions concerned with the exploitation of a multilingual service. Both technological and interface design issues have been investigated and s everal alternatives have been tested. We compared speech recognition accura cy and successful transaction completion rates of GSM and PSTN networks, an d evaluated crosscountry and cross-language effects. Using a new methodolog ical approach to assessment, a powerful predictive model was developed. Thi s model allowed users' subjective ratings to be predicted from objective me asurements. The results showed that an average Transaction Success rate of more than 92% was obtained when speech recognisers exhibiting good Word Rec ognition Accuracy were coupled to suitable dialogue interfaces in. the IVR system. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.