Automation of locality recognition in ADAS Plus

In North America, people call the directory assistance operator to find the phone number of a business or residential listing. The directory assistance service is generally maintained by telcos, and it represents a significant cost to them. Partial or complete automation of directory assistance would result in significant cost savings for telcos. Nortel has a product called Automated Directory Assistance System (ADAS) Plus which partially automates this directory assistance function through the use of speech recognition. The system has been deployed all across Quebec, through most of U S West and BellSouth. ADAS Plus primarily automates the response to the question "for what city?" through speech recognition. We give details of this speech recognition system and outline its performance in the deployed regions.