James R. Davis, Thomas F. Trobaugh

Abstract

Direction Assistance is an interactive program that provides spoken directions for automobile travel within the Boston area. The program has a telephone interface which uses touch tone keypad input and synthetic speech output. Routes are both short and easily followed. The directions are given in fluent English. The program has successfully directed newcomers through Boston. This paper tells how we built Direction Assistance, with emphasis on how the available databases are and are not useful for this application. It also talks about automatic generation of route descriptions, and compares our work to that of others.