Field trials of a telephone service for rail travel information

This paper reports on the RAILTEL field trial carried out by LIMSI, to assess the technical adequacy of available speech technology for interactive vocal access to static train timetable information. The data collection system used to carry out the field trials, is based on the LIMSI MASK spoken language system and runs on a Unix workstation with a high quality telephone interface. The spoken language system allows a mixed-initiative dialog where the user can provide any information at any point in time. Experienced users are thus able to provide all the information needed for database access in a single sentence, whereas less experienced users tend to provide shorter responses, allowing the system to guide them. The RAILTEL field trial was carried out using a commonly defined upon methodology. 100 naive subjects participated in the field trials, each contributing one call and completing a user questionnaire. 72% of the callers successfully completed their scenarios. The subjective assessment of the service was for the most part favorable, with subjects expressing interest in using such a service.