Interactive voice technology at work: the CSELT experience

The paper is a survey of the speech technologies and applications developed at CSELT, some of which are employed in real services on the Italian telephone network. This represents a major extension from the previous activity of the centre, which was essentially oriented to research, to a now broader set of activities which range from defining and experimenting new algorithmic approaches to speech product engineering and application development. In particular the paper describes two applications in the field trial phase, one related to an automatic operator, providing voice selection of large name directories, the other related to an automated network service for directory assistance, which is now accessible to all the Italian telephone customers.< >