Philips Extends Voice Recognition Vocabulary to More Than One Million Words

Business Wire, May 15, 2001

Business Editors

AACHEN, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 15, 2001

Philips Speech Processing, the global market leader in fully automated speech-driven directory assistance applications, today announced that its speech recognition technology is now able to push the limits of large vocabulary speech recognition beyond one million words in real-time without delay.

After a successful track record of more than five years in speech recognition and truly natural dialogue technologies, Philips Speech Processing continues to extend the capabilities of speech-driven applications worldwide with this latest technological advancement.

In the last few years, the increasing demand for directory assistance systems, particularly for large cities and areas with high-density population, has created the need for more extended vocabulary capabilities. A typical directory assistance service prompts the caller for name and address, then searches the database, and provides the telephone number and, if desired, connects the caller. Up to now, most systems would request first name and last name in separate steps. Now, the new expanded vocabulary from Philips Speech Processing enables the caller to speak to the system as he normally would do to a human operator, giving first name and last name together. Thus, the search for the required telephone number is more natural, faster and makes hold times for the caller shorter. Additionally, it allows service providers the opportunity to improve customer service through the use of a more user-friendly system.

"We thoroughly understand directory assistance applications and the recent demand for larger vocabularies. Reacting to this, we have extended our vocabulary size to above one million words in real-time, which makes it by far the largest in the industry," said Matthias Pankert, director of Product Strategy and Planning at Philips Speech Processing/Telephony Solutions. "This therefore puts us even further ahead in the technology of automatic speech recognition, and demonstrates our aim of constantly satisfying our customers so that they, in turn, can provide superior directory assistance services to their callers."

The market potential for automated directory assistance is immense as it includes the subcategories of white pages, yellow pages, auto attendants and call-completion services. Philips' new extended number of entries in one lexicon opens up new opportunities, especially for applications requiring extensive name lists such as stock quote information through voice portals.

In addition to the new extended vocabulary, Philips Speech Processing's technology can switch among languages and vocabularies during calls as required. Supporting more than 25 languages, Philips offers the largest language portfolio in the industry. The module SpeechFinder(TM), specifically created for the requirements of directory assistance applications and a leader in this field, simplifies the one-to-one recognition of extensive name lists in databases and guarantees high recognition rates. Philips also provides leading edge technology for automation of business listings. This intelligent search engine for free form input combined with the new extended vocabulary size will lead to a new dimension of directory assistance automation.

Philips Speech Processing has been active in the field of speech recognition technology for more than 20 years with installations in Europe, North and South America and the Asia-Pacific region, and has obtained a significant number of patents. Additionally, Philips is recognized as having pioneered true language understanding with open grammars which allows callers to answer anything to the system's questions, not just the pre-defined answers as in closed grammars.

About Philips

Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with sales of EUR 37.9 billion in 2000. It is a global leader in colour television sets, lighting, electric shavers, colour picture tubes for televisions and monitors, and one-chip TV products. Its 219,400 employees in more than 60 countries are active in the areas of lighting, consumer electronics, domestic appliances, components, semiconductors, and medical systems. Philips is quoted on the NYSE (symbol:PHG), London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and other stock exchanges. News from Philips is located at www.news.philips.com.

About Philips Speech Processing

Philips Speech Processing, a business unit of Royal Philips Electronics, is a pioneer and global leader in speech recognition, natural dialogue and language understanding technologies, with more than 40 years experience in the development and marketing of speech products. Philips offers a broad portfolio of speech technology solutions to the telecommunications industry. As a developer and provider of speech technologies in multiple languages, Philips has the largest installed base of speech recognition and natural language understanding systems in Europe, and is a large and growing provider of speech technology in the Americas and other regions of the world. Installations include directory assistance and call center services automation, voice portals, telephony and Internet applications. Visit www.speech.philips.com/telephony for additional information.