The NESPOLE! System for multilingual speech communication over the Internet

The NESPOLE! System is a speech communication system designed to support multilingual interaction between common users and providers of e-commerce services over the Internet. The core of the system is a distributed interlingua-based speech-to-speech translation system, which is supported by multimodal capabilities that allow the two parties participating in the communication to share Web pages and graphical content which can be annotated using gestures. We describe the unique features and considerations behind the design and implementation of this system, and evaluate these within the context of a constructed full prototype of the system that was developed for the domain of travel planning