Equipment News pp. 24-7, (October). Voice processing John Holdsworth Newbridge Networks Ltd. Contents 37.1 The voice processing market 37/3 37.2 Anatomy of a voice processing system 37/5 37.3 Future directions 37/8 37.4 Bibliography 37/9 This page intentionally left blank The voice processing market 37/3 37.1 The voice processing market requiring the use of DTMF or voice recognition techniques. His- torically these systems have used DTMF telephones, but increas- 37.1.1 Introduction ingly in Europe are using speech recognition technology for caller interactions. The services offered by a voice response unit are usually limited to one or two and the voice storage capacity on disk Voice processing is the term used for the technologies of storing and as a consequence is very limited. The range of telephone line sizes replaying speech, compressing and decompressing speech, the tech- of voice response units commonly found is between 4 and 30 lines. nologies of speech recognition and text to speech conversion. Traditionally the voice response system interfaces to the com- While voice processing can be used in industrial process control puter containing the database by emulating a terminal. A common and military applications to allow hands free operations of plant or form of terminal emulation used is IBM 3274 / 3278 SNA. The equipment, the industry is increasingly focused on telephone callers voice service 'reads' data from the terminal emulation 'screen' and accessing the voice processing equipment. What follows addresses speaks this information to the caller. The caller can select the these telephony oriented applications. information to be spoken and the screen being used. The DTMF Voice processing products can be split into the following types: commands sent by the caller are translated into 'key pushes' on the emulated keyboard. 1. Audiotex. Other systems use directly interpreted data, especially formatted 2. Voice response. for the application. This data is sent by any of the traditional data 3. Voice mail. commun