Automation of Telecom Italia directory assistance service: field trial results

Directory assistance services, which are used to retrieve the phone number of residential or business listings, are generally maintained by telcos and represent a significant cost for them. Partial or complete automation of these services would imply significant cost savings and speech recognition is a promising technique to achieve this goal, although its full exploitation still presents significant technical challenges. Telecom Italia carried out a trial of a system designed to completely automate a portion of requests on a country wide basis without any intervention of the operator, implying recognition of residential names on a subscriber database of about 25 million listings. We describe the speech recognition system and report the trial results.