This paper provides an overview of oper&onal and experimental telephone services exploiting automatic speech recognition and/or text-to-speech in France, VK, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal. It illustrates a number of contemporary European systems and summarises the current status of a European project (EURESCOM P502 : MIVA, "Multilingual Interactive Voice Activated telephone services") which involves the Telecommunication Laboratories of these countries.technology. Monolingual laboratory tests are planned for October 1996 and multilingual field trials for March 97.Another goal of this project is to measure the impact of the different networks on the ASR performances, i.e. the potential performance degradation observed when building vocabulary models from recordings made for a given language on a given national telephone network and using them for recognition on another national network. This analysis should allow, in particular, to estimate the feasibility of sharing the vocabulary development costs for multilingual telephone services.
FRANCE