Voice-activated home banking system and its field trial

Speech recognition techniques are most useful when used over the phone. A telephone speech recognizer was developed and many field trials were carried out (G. Orel, 1995; M. Lennig and G. Bielby, 1994; S. Yamamoto et al., 1994). We have developed telephone speech recognition hardware for a voice activated home banking system based on a client server network configuration (T. Isobe et al., 1995). The speech recognition unit is a workstation with six boards for dealing with simultaneous multi channel processing. The speech recognition algorithm implemented in the boards, each of which has three DSPs and an MPU, handles various tasks, such as recognizing connected digits, bank name, branch name, money amount, and confirmation far completing the service dialogs. Experimental field trials on 90 subjects showed that with proper instructions and guidance, the service task was successfully achieved in 85% of trials. We sent out a questionnaire, and one third of the subjects replied that speech recognition was useful.