A speech agent for remote e-mail access

This paper presents the design and implementation issues for a desktop agent running under the MS-Windows 95 environment. This agent is the result of the research and development efforts of the authors on speech processing at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing. It has emerged as an extension of the authors' previous work on speech interfaces for visually impaired persons and it is currently supporting only modern Greek. The speech agent (SA) is responsible for delivering e-mail messages through telephone lines employing speech synthesis and speech recognition techniques. A user can "connect" to the agent by simply placing a call to a phone connected to the PC. Using a standard predefined set of commands (words or sentences), the user can then instruct the agent to read an e-mail, check for new e-mails, delete e-mails, etc.