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.