Where's My Beer?

THE CHALLENGE

Suppose you own a package goods store on Main Street. It's midnight on December 27th and you're getting a bit nervous. The New Year's Eve rush will be upon you in a matter of days, and your beer stock is low. You've placed a large order with the factory but you have no assurance it will arrive in time to produce the end-of-year profits you count on. You admit you should have placed the order sooner to ensure delivery, but that doesn't ease your concerns at this time of night.

THE SOLUTION

Rather than toss and turn, you check the time and decide to call the brewery. A friendly voice prompts you for your distributor account number. A voice response system, using text-to-speech (TTS) software, recognizes your account number and recites your name and location of your store. You ask for shipment status and the voice informs you that a thousand cases of beer were shipped to your address on Main Street, via Yellow Freight truck number 456, at 6:00 p.m. on December 26th, scheduled to arrive on December 28th.

Comfortable that your order will arrive in time for the last few days of the holiday rush, you ease yourself back into bed.

An application similar to this is being built today using TTS technology from Lernout & Hauspie (L&H), a supplier of advanced speech recognition (ASR) and TTS technologies. The voice commands are not currently part of the application (DTMF detection is used), but can be added using ASR technology, also from L&H, and available today on the CT platform.