Voice recognition in the telecommunications industry

This document will attempt to describe both the motivators and the technology behind the shift from traditional touch-tone input to speech recognition in telecommunications. It will give the background for the motivators, address the speech recognition technologies and the human factors issues for their use in telephony, and also address the use of the technologies in some selected applications. The document will conclude with a summary of the issues. Speech recognition requires a very different approach from touch-tone to the telephone interface. The main intent of this document is to show that a poor service with a good interface can be a success but an excellent service with a poor interface cannot succeed.