Directory assistance automation in Bell Canada: trial results

Speech recognition was used to automate directory assistance in a 6-month trial with Bell Canada´s public customers. The bilingual application 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 fully automated. Customer and operator reactions to the system were positive. Bell-Northern Research´s flexible vocabulary recognizer, using a vocabulary of 1,700 city names and synonyms, performed well under real world conditions. Economically significant operator work time savings were demonstrated