Most students will have had some experience trying to use the existing automated telephone services, whether performing transactions with a mutual fund company or a bank, or making an air flight reservation. Discussion of these experiences will reveal problems associated with the current technology: limited “vocabulary” of the systems for speech, inflexible menus, and the necessity to talk to human operators or service representatives to do anything “hard” or complex.
At this point, the instructor can then focus on the benefits of SR Corp’s technology. By being both speaker-independent and very accurate in “natural language” processing, the system could provide a much easier and more powerful interface for telephone users. Companies could therefore use the technology to handle a broader range of applications and do so with greater depth and quality