Putting speech recognition to work in the telephone network

The use of speaker-independent speech recognition in the development of Northern Telecom's automated alternate billing service (AABS) for collect calls, third-number-billed calls, and calling-card-billed calls is discussed. The AABS system automates a collect call by recording the calling party's name, placing a call to the called party, playing back the calling party's name to the called party, informing the called party that he or she has a collect call from that person, and asking. 'Will you pay for the call?' The operation of AABS, the architecture of the voice interface, and the speech recognition algorithm are described, and the accuracy of the recognizer is discussed. AABS relies on isolated-word recognition, although more advanced techniques that can recognize continuous speech are being pursued.<
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