Providing Interactive and User-Adapted E-City Services by Means of Voice Portals

Digital cities offer new ways to provide information and services of a town or a region in an integrated form, favoring citizen participation and the use of services in previously unavailable ways. In addition, Speech Technologies and Language Processing have made possible the development of a number of new applications which are based on spoken dialog systems. One of them is voice portals, which facilitate spoken interaction with the Internet to provide their users with specific information or web services. In this chapter, we describe a voice portal developed to provide municipal information. The different functionalities provided by the system include to query information about the City Council, access city information, carry out several steps and procedures, complete surveys, access the citizen’s mailbox to leave messages for suggestions and complaints, and to be transferred to the City Council to be attended by a teleoperator. This way, the voice portal improves the support of public services by increasing their availability, flexibility, and control while reducing costs and missed calls.