James R. Davis

Abstract

This paper describes the user interface to Direction Assistance, a program which provides high quality directions for driving between two points in the Boston area. The interface employs synthetic speech and touch tone input to provide access to telephone callers. The interface is able to diagnose common user errors and explain itself to the user. This paper also discussea some of the problems of synthetic speech for this type of interface. The most significant limitation of presently available speech synthehers is the lack of ability to specify prosodic features.'