The Swedish automatic reverse directory service

As a complementary service to the manual expensive reverse directory service an automatic service has been introduced using diphon based synthetic speech. Some problems from the development of the service are described and how we solved them, and an overview of the system design is given. The inquired number is entered by touch-tone and the corresponding name and the address from Telia´s directory database are incorporated correctly into the responding carrier phrase. For the pronunciation both a lexicon with 200.000 entries is used as well as general text-to-speech rules. Spelling options are given. Several steps in improving the dialogue have resulted in high acceptance of the service