Voice technologies for telephony services

The paper describes two applications of voice interfaces for services provided over the telephone, together with the corresponding enabling technologies. The first application is a dealer locator (DL) service: a service commonly provided by call centers (CC) that allows customers to find the location of the closest dealer of a certain product. Our DL uses text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) to implement a voice interface between the customer and a company´s dealer database, in a fully automated service. The second application uses multiple input modalities (i.e., voice recognition and keypad) and knowledge sources (e.g., customer databases) to enable callers to enter their personal information in an automated form-filling system, with high accuracy and reliability. The enabling technology is the one that combines the uncertain information provided by automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is never 100% accurate, with the certain, even though ambiguous, information provided through the telephone keypad.