A speech-based conversation system for accessing agriculture commodity prices in Indian languages

We demonstrate a speech based conversation system under development for information access by farmers in rural and semi-urban areas of India. The challenges are that the system should take care of the significant variations in the pronunciation and also the highly natural and hence unstructured dialog in the usage of the system. The focus of this study is to develop a conversational system which is adaptable to the users over a period of time, in the sense that fewer interactions with the system to get the required information. Some other novel features of the system include multiple decoding schemes and accountability of the wide variations in dialog, pronunciation and environment. A video demonstrating the Mandi information system is available at http://speech.iiit.ac.in/index.php/demos.html