The Program Guide Information System is an electronic call-in demo application offering a variety of information about television programs over the phone. A user may call the program guide from any phone and obtain the desired program information by conversing with the system in complete natural sentences - just as one would speak with another person. The current demo application is able to handle two languages, English and Finnish, and can switch between them at any point in the dialogue.

Check out the Talkative TV Guide demo

Speak freely with the system

The Natural Language Understanding (NLU) portion of the system handles the voice interface and information retrieval. The NLU aims for human-computer interaction similar to human-human conversation. The user is not restricted to a particular vocabulary, but s/he may make a request using complete natural sentences. The statistical approaches used for the speech recognition and understanding enable the system to understand sentences that it has not encountered before, but which are within the domain of the application. Thus, NLU crucially differs from grammar-based implementations where users can only use certain words or phrases in a pre-defined order. Natural Language Understanding is, therefore, a step towards more user-friendly human-computer interaction.

The development of a multilingual program guide, with which people can freely use more than one language during a phone call, naturally sets further requirements on the implementation, such as identifying the language that the user is currently speaking, and consequently, providing the answer in the correctly identified language.

Ask for what you want

From the user's viewpoint, there are two steps in retrieving program information. First, the user may request TV programs based on one or a combination of the listing parameters. Then, s/he can either select a program from the list offered to get further information, or s/he might choose to ask for a new listing. The program guide information system is designed to allow the user to switch the topic at any point of the conversation, i.e. the system does not require the user to follow a certain dialogue path.

See the search aspects of the Program Guide Information System

The Program Guide Information System also contains personalization features. The user may set his/her preferences (e.g. program types, channels, performers) via a web site, which can be recalled the next time s/he calls the system. By taking into account the user's preferences, the NLU system can reorganize its responses for enhanced usability. That means instead of providing the programs in the chronological order, the programs best fulfilling the user's personal preferences will be listed first.

The Program Guide System utilizes IBM´s ViaVoice™ toolkit, which contains the telephony tools and a large vocabulary speech recognition engine (IBM's ViaVoice™ Telephony Tools) as well as the tools for the NLU development (IBM's ViaVoice™ Telephony Natural Language Tools).

Joint European effort

The Talkative TV Guide demo was developed in 2000-2002 within the CATCH-2004 (Converse in AThens Cologne and Helsinki) 5th framework EU project with several participants from five European countries. CATCH-2004 developed approaches to provide people with multilingual access to a wide range of transactional and information services and systems. Access is provided using a unified architecture across a range of devices including kiosks, telephones, and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled appliances.

Further readings:

Harrikari, Heli; Mast, Marion; Ross, Thomas; Schulz, Henrik. "Different Approaches to Build Multilingual Conversational Systems". 5th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2002, Brno, Czech Republic, 2002.

Boda, Péter; Chande, Suresh; Gupta, Nidhi; Hartikainen, Elviira; Autere, Sirpa. "Flexibility and efficiency through personalisation? Experiments with a conversational Program Guide Information System". EACL-03 Workshop on "Dialogue Systems: interaction, adaptation and styles of management", Budapest, Hungary, April 13-14, 2003.

Hartikainen, Elviira; Boda, Péter. "Results and Observations from the Evaluation of a Telephony-based Conversational Information Retrieval System". First ISCA Tutorial & Research Workshop on "Auditory Quality of Systems", Akademie Mont-Cenis, Germany, April 23-25, 2003.