Speech based drug information system for aged and visually impaired persons

Medicine Line (MLN) is an automatic telephone information system operating in Hungary since December 2006. It is primarily intended for visually handicapped persons and elderly people. In Hungary the National Institute of Pharmacy (NIP) coordinates the approval of new drugs and also their Patient Information Leaflets (PIL). Medicine Line reads this textual information chapter by chapter to the citizens. The number of different medicines used in Hungary is about 5000. New drugs come into practice regularly, and some are withdrawn after a certain time. The MLN system ensures 24 hour access to the information. The spoken dialogue input is processed by a specialized ASR module (the caller tells the name of the drug, the chapter title etc.). The output is given by a TTS synthesizer specialized to read drug names and medical Latin words correctly. The user can control the system by DTMF buttons too. In this article we will focus on features of speech based components.