Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications (IVTTA'98)

Torino, Italy
September 29-30, 1998

O-TEL - An Experimental Reverse Directory Telephone Service with Barge-In Capability

Andrej Miksic, Zdravko Kacic, Bogomir Horvat

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

Issues of practical implementation of a telephone dialog system are discussed with the reference to the experimental O-TEL system (a telephone reverse directory service) developed at University of Maribor. The system offers a user to call the system, utters the telephone number in order to receive information on the subscriber (name and address). Critical implementation issues are: allowing a full-duplex telephone interaction (user barge-in); design of a dialog flowchart that enables fluent and fast dialog; robust feature extraction with channel compensation; assuring a high recognition accuracy; and synchronizing the system prompt signal with the feature extraction part of a recognizer for the purposes of introducing echo cancellation as a part of feature extraction. Field trials have shown especially high rate of dialog completion and a good error recovery scheme. The capability of barge-in reduced the dialog completion time for up to 56\% (especially in error recovering phase).

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Miksic, Andrej / Kacic, Zdravko / Horvat, Bogomir (1998): "O-TEL - an experimental reverse directory telephone service with barge-in capability", In IVTTA'98, 171-174.