Deploying speech interfaces to the masses

Abstract

Speech systems are typically deployed either over phones, e.g. IVR agents, or on embodied agents, e.g. domestic robots. Most of these systems are limited to a particular platform i.e., only accessible by phone or in situated interactions. This limits scalability and potential domain of operation. Our goal is to make speech interfaces more widely available, and we are proposing a new approach for deploying such interfaces on the internet along with traditional platforms. In this work, we describe a lightweight speech interface architecture built on top of Freeswitch, an open source softswitch platform. A softswitch enables us to provide users with access over several types of channels (phone, VOIP, etc.) as well as support multiple users at the same time. We demonstrate two dialog applications developed using this approach: 1) Virtual Chauffeur: a voice based virtual driving experience and 2) Talkie: a speech-based chat bot.