ASR Suggestions For Small Dictionnary (<1000 Entries) Lookup In France/french

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Hello,

I’m in the early stages of designing an Emergency calling service IVR
application.

The IVR application asks simple one or two questions like “which is the postal code of the area you are currently calling from ?” “Is the correct
?”. The expected values are a 5-digits number like
“twenty-five-thousand-two-hundreds-twelve” or “twenty-five-two-twelve”
variations or “yes or no”.

From received answers, this application would route incoming call to an appropriate Public Safety Answering Point.

As IVR requires working DTMF and sometimes it’s not easy to type DTMF with wireless phones, I wonder if I should or not use ASR as an alternative to IVR.

My requirements are:
– spoken language is France/french
– low call volume (<5 calls at peak time) - asterisk 13 and up support - hosted (prefered) or online - if hosted, should be installable on Debian (prefered) or CentOS on a dedicated VM. 1. What do you think of using ASR for such application ? Would you favor IVR, ASR or implement both ? 2. Which ASR would you recommend ? Best regards

3 thoughts on - ASR Suggestions For Small Dictionnary (<1000 Entries) Lookup In France/french

  • Having experimented with something similar myself, I’d say you are about to create a vast amount of complexity by moving away from keypad entry.

    Also, a lot of the natural language APIs don’t support French – for example, Amazon Lex or https://dialogflow.com would be great for this as they understand contexts and intents… but they don’t understand French.

    But if you pursue ASR, try this:
    https://cloud.google.com/speech/
    Switch the console to French and see how you get on. In English, sometimes it turns it into a number, sometimes it comes out as “twenty five thousand two hundred twelve”.

    I think you have two choices with ASR:

    1: Explain to the caller that they must say one digit at a time, in which case, easy! Pick any free speech recognition you want.
    2: Try and handle “natural language” ways of speaking numbers, in which case be prepared for a lot of debugging and learning!

    I could be wrong – if anyone knows, please let us both know, too!

  • Very interesting opinion: I never thought of this “natural language API”
    extension but it seems quite necessary to me, now.

    A quick search over the net showed [2] which is said to support both French and combine with Google Cloud Speech API. Sticking to IVR seems far simpler and safe though.

    [2] https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/?hl=en

    2017-10-22 11:21 GMT+02:00 Jonathan H :