A study on the ability to recognize telephone quality speech from large customer populations.

To test the viability of speaker independent word recognition systems for large telephone user populations, it was necessary to conduct a study under "real-world" conditions. Such an experiment was described by Wilpon and Rabiner (1983), in which telephone customers, speaking in a standard telephone environment, in Portland, Maine were asked to speak their telephone number as a sequence of isolated digits. The results from that study were very encouraging. However, several issues still needed to be addressed.