Multilinguality in voice activated information services: The P502 EURESCOM project

The paper describes the multilingual system developed within the framework of the P502 EURESCOM project. The system described provides information about major telephone services available in United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Portugal in five languages. We present the results of a number of experiments carried out in the five countries, aiming to try and answer some fundamental questions concerned with the exploitation of a multilingual service. Both technological and interface design issues have been investigated and several alternatives have been tested. The prototypes which were implemented showed that a transaction success rate of more than 92% can be obtained when speech recognisers exhibiting good word recognition accuracy are coupled to suitable dialogue interfaces in the IVR system.