Patent ID: 6314165
Filing Date: 2001-11-06
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
An automated hotel attendant system for coordinating room-to-room calling over a telephone switching system that supports a plurality of telephone extensions, comprising:a hotel guest database system for receiving and storing characters that spell the names of hotel guests and for assigning each guest an associated telephone extension;a speech recognition system having a lexicon for storing word-phoneme data that associates a set of words with the phonemes that form those words;a lexicon training system coupled to said database system for adding hotel guest names and corresponding phoneme data to said lexicon, said training system including a phoneticizer operable to convert the characters that spell a given hotel guests name into a plurality of pronunciations, where the phoneticizer employs letter-only decision trees and phoneme-mixed decision trees to produce said plurality of pronunciations; anda call routing system coupled to said recognition system for converting a spoken name of a hotel guest entered from one of said telephone extensions into a predefined hotel guest name and using said hotel guest name to retrieve an assigned telephone extension from said database system;said call routing system being interfaced with said telephone switching system to cause said telephone switching system to call said telephone extension in response to the entry of said spoken name from one of said telephone extensions.