A Speech Interface for Open-Domain Question-Answering

Speech interfaces to question-answering systems offer significant potential for finding information with phones and mobile networked devices. We describe a demonstration of spoken question answering using a commercial dictation engine whose language models we have customized to questions, a Web-based textprediction interface allowing quick correction of errors, and an open-domain question-answering system, AnswerBus, which is freely available on the Web. We describe a small evaluation of the effect of recognition errors on the precision of the answers returned and make some concrete recommendations for modifying a question-answering system for improving robustness to spoken input.