Automatic recognition of Danish natural numbers for telephone applications

In major areas of the world, it is custom to cluster the digits of long numbers into groups of two or three digits and pronounce them using natural numbers such as “eighty/five” rather than the digits `eight five´. Forcing the users of automatic services to change their speaking styles could seriously limit the acceptance of such services. So far, however, it has not been considered possible to obtain sufficiently high accuracies with natural numbers. In this paper, we present a series of experiments that improved our string accuracy to 93.3% for Danish 8-digit telephone numbers. This is very close to the accuracy obtained for connected digits, 95.3%, in the same language