Free phone calls - if you let Birmingham University listen in

Apr 29 2008

Talkative Brummies can now access free phone calls if they allow researchers to listen in on their conversations.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham are looking for chatty volunteers with local accents to help them develop speech recognition systems for telephones.

They are hoping to record about 200 hours of conversation in an effort to create systems which take better account of how English is spoken differently across Britain.

Professor Martin Russell from the department of electronic, electrical and computer engineering said: "The ultimate goal is to enable people to talk to systems over the phone in the same way that they would talk to other people.

"At present most phone-based applications ask the user to press a button on the phone or say single words in response to prompts. Some systems already allow free speech, but they are not always successful."