Experience with the Philips automatic train timetable information system

Introduces an automatic system for train timetable information over the telephone that provides accurate connections between 1200 German cities. The caller can talk to it in unrestricted, natural, and fluent speech, very much like he or she would communicate with a human operator, and is not given any instructions in advance. In an ongoing field trial, this system has been made available to the general public, both to gather speech data and to evaluate its performance. This field test was organized as a bootstrapping process: initially, the system was trained with just the developers' voices, then the telephone number was passed around within the department, the company, and finally, the outside world. After each step, the newly collected material was used for retraining and general improvements. The observations and results from this test are reported.<>