Brazilian Portuguese speech-driven answering system

Call centers are being increasingly incorporated into companies and institutions. There are usually two different types of call centers: customer services with human attendants and numeric keypad-driven automatic service. Human attendants have high costs. The use of numeric keypads are not intuitive and increases system's rejection rate. In order to contribute to the reduction of these limitations, this paper proposes an automated answering system with speech recognition for Brazilian Portuguese. As a case study, the system handles phone calls of the Computer Science Department secretary at a federal university. Current version is able to provide automatic call transfer to department's lectures, voice messages recording and automatic e-mailing. Recognition evaluation has been done by means of four different metrics. The metric WIP pointed a speech recognition rate of ~91% for limited vocabulary.