Perception Technology Corp, Canton, Massachusetts is planning to add speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition capability to its full line of interactive speech processing systems under a development agreement with Voice Processing Corp of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In their present incarnation, Perception Technology’s systems prompt a touch-tone telephone caller to key in specified touch-tones on the telephone keypad and translates the touch-tone signals into a format the host computer can interpret. The speech processing system then translates the computer’s responses into pre-recorded human speech that is spoken back over the telephone line to the inquirer. With the addition of speech recognition of a limited number of words – but with no need for unnatural pauses, callers will also be able to use speech input, rather than touch tone input, to obtain information from a host computer database.
