Speech technology applications to telephone services

The author presents the performance issues associated with using speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis technologies in the telephone network, as well as experimental results obtained in preliminary trials. In particular, he discusses both the motivations and the technical approaches for applying these techniques to important automated telephone services, such as the alternate billing service and the reverse directory inquiry. In particular, the main issues relate to the ACNA (Automated Customer Name and Address) service for the Italian language are examined