Key challenges in deploying a voice activated premier dialing application

Nortel has been involved in speech recognition since 1978 and since 1989 the company has been deploying various speech recognition applications for use in the telephony business. In 1995, Nortel developed the voice activated premier dialing (VAPD) application which allows callers to access various subscribing businesses or services (such as entertainment events) by calling one number and saying the business or service name they want to connect to. The world's first VAPD trial was held in Saskatchewan Regina. It was a joint effort between Nortel, Stentor Resource Center Inc. (SRCI) and SaskTel. The trial lasted nine months and provided valuable lessons to the design, speech and human factors teams. This paper gives an overview of VAPD and describes the key challenges encountered during the Regina trial as well as the main lessons learned from deploying such applications.