How to Build a Spoken Dialog System with Limited ( or no ) Language Resources

This paper evaluates low cost, rapidly deployable speech technologies for new languages as a means to improve equitable, affordable access to information technology (IT). We describe our field work in Tamil Nadu, recording speech from within a multi-modal (speech and touch) dialog system. The performance of a speech recognizer built using cross-language adaptation is evaluated on our field recordings, with implications for an iterative, learning approach for spoken dialog systems in conditions of limited language resources.

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