An automated hotel attendant using speech recognition

摘要

An automated hotel attendant is provided for coordinating room-to-room calling over a telephone switching system that supports multiple telephone extensions. A hotel registration system receives and stores the spelled names of hotel guests as well as assigns each guest an associated telephone extension. A lexicon training system is connected to the hotel registration system for generating pronunciations for each spelled name by converting the characters that spell those names into word-phoneme data. This word-phoneme data is in turn stored in a lexicon that is used by a speech recognition system. In particular, a phoneticizer in conjunction with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based model trainer serves as the basis for the lexicon training system, such that one or several HMM models associated with each guest name are stored in the lexicon. An automated attendant is coupled to the speech recognition system for converting a spoken name of a hotel guest entered from one of the telephone extensions into a predefined hotel guest name that can be used to retrieve an assigned telephone extension from the hotel registration system. Next, the automated attendant causes the telephone switching system to call the requested telephone extension in response to the entry of the spoken name from one of the telephone extensions.