Preliminary results of a multilingual interactive voice activated telephone service for people-on-the-move

The EURESCOM P502 project, Multilingual Interactive Voice Activated (MIVA) telephone services, launched in 1995 for a three-years term, aimed at designing and experimenting on an automatic multilingual telephone assistant for people-onthe-move, that provided them with instructions about the use of most important telephone services in the country they are traveling. The core information provided by the system is: emergency services, international and national calls, card calls. Six European Telecom research laboratories were involved in the project: CNET, the project leader; British Telecom, Deutsch Telekom, KPN, Portugal Telecom and CSELT. The final prototype has to include a language selection module and a menu-driven procedure, using a common structure of the information contents in all languages. Several factors are currently being investigated, such as the impact of a talkthrough capability, the effect of the cellular network as well as the usage of different national networks on the ASR performance, and the optimization of the dialogue strategy at the system interface level. The prototypes are in the process of being tested within the individual national research units, and cross-country tests will follow. As a further benefit, the potential savings which can be obtained by sharing the costs of development of ASR-based multilingual telephone services, will be estimated successively. A final field trial of the national implementations of the systems has to be carried out starting October ‘97 for a thorough evaluation of the multilingual services.