CHAPTER 35

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1. You can develop text-to-speech conversion software using words as the basic units. You can record a large number of words and store each word in a separate file. The program for text-to-speech conversion has to do the following:

   • Read the input sentence.

   • Remove punctuation marks.

   • Convert all capital letters to small letters.

   • Expand abbreviations such as Mr., Prof., and Rs.

   • Scan each word in the sentence and pick up the corresponding sound file from the database of spoken words.

   • Create a new sound file that is a concatenation of all the sound files of the words.

   • Play the new sound file through the sound card.

2. To design an IVR system for a telebanking application, you need to create a database (in MS Access, MS SQL, or Oracle, for instance) that contains bank account number, password, type of account, and balance amount. The information that needs to be stored in the database is: account holder name, address, account number, type of account, and present bank balance.

   • You also need to design the dialogues for interaction between the account holder and the IVR system. A typical dialogue is as follows:

   • IVR: Welcome to ABC Bank's IVR system. Please dial 1 for information in English, dial 2 for information in Hindi.

   • User: Dials 1.

   • IVR: Please dial your account number.

   • User: Dials 2346.

   • IVR: The account number you dialed is two three four six. Please dial your password.

   • User: Dials 4567.

   • IVR: You have a savings bank account. The present balance is Rupees Ten Thousand Four Hundred. Thank you for calling the IVR.

3. You can experiment with Microsoft's Speech SDK to develop text-to-speech and speech recognition–based applications. IBM's WebSphere can also be used for development of such applications.

4. For most Indian languages, the number of phonemes is about 60. The number of diphones is about 1500. The number of syllables is about 20,000. You need to store nearly 200,000 words if you want to use the word as the basic unit for text-to-speech conversion. It is better to use syllables.

5. A call center consists of the following components:

   • A local area network in which one node (computer) is given to each agent.

   • A server that runs the customer relations management software.

   • A PBX with one extension to each agent.

   • Automatic call distribution (ACD) software.

   • Fax-on-demand software.

   • A interactive voice response system.

6. Nortel and Cisco are the two major suppliers of call center equipment. You can get the details from their Web sites http://www.cisco.com and http://www.nortelcommuncations.com.

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