SLS :: Research Initiatives :: Mobile Information Access

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

SLS RESEARCH

Telephony-based Information Access

Some of the earliest deployments of spoken dialogue technology were used for telephony applications. An audio-only environment presents significant interface challenges for users attempting to navigate a complex information space. SLS began deploying prototype conversational systems on toll-free numbers beginning in early 1997. These natural interaction systems, which are significantly more flexible than the conventional directed dialogue, constrained recognition strategies of most commercial deployments, were the first of their kind. Since then, we have continued to deploy prototype systems in order to collect unconstrained data from users, to evaluate current spoken language technology, and to support ongoing research.

Some of the telephone-based applications that are currently available include:

JUPITER
A conversational system that provides up-to-date weather information over the phone. Jupiter knows about 500+ cities worldwide and gets its data from four different Web-based sources.

MERCURY
A conversational interface that enables browsing of flight schedule and pricing information about via the telephone.

Further Reading

V. Zue and J. Glass, "Conversational Interfaces: Advances and Challenges" Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue on Spoken Language Processing, Vol. 88, August 2000. (PDF)

V. Zue, et al., "JUPITER: A Telephone-Based Conversational Interface for Weather Information," IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Vol. 8 , No. 1, January 2000.(PDF)


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