Voice-IF: a mixed-initiative spoken dialogue system for AT&t conference services

This paper presents the Voice-IF system; a mixedinitiative spoken dialogue system for AT&T conference services. One objective for creating Voice-IF is to provide a vehicle for evaluating our technologies in speech synthesis, recognition, understanding, dialogue and user interfaces on a real application with relatively novice users. Another objective is to design, build and test a set of tools that allow us to rapidly prototype spoken dialogue applications. In this paper, we describe the performance of Voice-IF during its 6-week deployment period. In particular, we report a) results of perceptual evaluations of the synthesized speech, b) system performance and user satisfaction ratings, c) PARADISE analysis of the data, and d) comparisons with other systems, including the W99 conference registration system used at the ASRU’99 workshop and the Travel Communicator system.