Performance analysis of a multilingual directory enquiries application

Abstract

In a multilingual society such as South Africa, a practical directory enquiries (DE) application should be able to serve users from various language backgrounds with information relating to names in various languages: a difficult task for automated speech recognition-based systems to perform. We describe the implementation of such a DE application (a ‘Municipality Hotline’) and evaluate its performance, focussing on its usability by callers from various linguistic backgrounds.