A dialogue system for telephone-based services integrating spoken and written language

We describe a dialogue system for telephone-based services that integrates, spoken (dialogue component) and written language (optical character recognition-OCR). This system has been developed for a car insurance company in the framework of the LE-1 1802 project ACCeSS, but can be easily adapted to a different task. Handwritten application forms from prospective clients, concerning new contracts, are processed by the OCR component and the extracted information is stored on a local customers' database. The dialogue component reads the customers' database and collects the missing information of the application forms by calling the corresponding customer and asking about the blank or ambiguous fields. The system is currently tested at the company's site.