Abstract:

This paper describes progress to date on a Government supported programme to evaluate the potential applications of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to market and survey research. The paper reviews the growth of telephone research in Europe in recent years and goes on to discuss how technology might be used to reduce costs with- out reducing quality. ASR is briefly described and its potential for self-completion discussed. The paper progresses to describing the manner in which an original large scale and representative English speech database has been built up for use in sub- word modelling. The body of the paper discusses the new and challenging issues of conducting "interviewerless" telephone interviews. The ways in which software is re- quired to replace the implicit skills of interviewers are outlined and examples given of how these have been tested in the field by replicating an existing continuous customer quality service.