A voice-operated multi-domain telephone information system

This contribution describes the first Czech voice-operated information system running on the public telephone network. The system named InfoCity is a multi-domain inquiry service. It offers a wide range of information useful for citizens of a middle-size city, such as programs of cinemas and theatres, overview of local sport events, timetables of city and regional transport, opening times of public or private institutions. Since March 1999 the InfoCity serves inhabitants and visitors of Liberec, a city with 100000 population. During the first 9 months of its operation, more than 2900 inquiry calls were automatically processed. Although the system uses a fixed dialogue scenario with discrete-utterance input (with 220-item vocabulary), long-term statistics show that a typical call (with 5 to 9 dialogue turns) does not take more than 2 minutes. Under field trial conditions the average recognition score is about 87%