MS connect: a fully featured auto-attendant: system design, implementation and performance

In this paper we describe our solutions to the problems faced in building the fully featured auto-attendant application that currently provides telephone access to approximately 50,000 Microsoft employees. The paper focuses on issues that the application developer can address directly. Some of the problems tackled in building the grammar include the handling of homonyms, several people with the same name, and data requiring name normalization. Our voice UI helped with this high perplexity task by providing multiple ways to specify the required employee, including spelling their email address or selecting them from a list of employees. Over 70% of the calls analyzed were successfully completed. The system was built using the Microsoft Speech Application SDK and runs on the Microsoft Speech Server 2004.