JUPlTER: a telephone-based conversational interface for weather information

TLDR

JUPITER has been the primary research platform for our group, enabling studies in telephone‑based speech recognition, robust language understanding, language generation, dialogue modeling, and multilingual interfaces. This paper describes the development of JUPITER, detailing its underlying human language technologies, system issues such as utterance rejection and content harvesting, and presenting evaluation results. JUPITER is a telephone‑based conversational interface that delivers worldwide weather forecasts via spoken dialogue, built using speech recognition, language understanding, generation, and dialogue modeling techniques. Since its launch in May 1997, JUPITER has handled over 30,000 calls (180,000 utterances) from primarily naive users through a North American toll‑free number.

Abstract

In early 1997, our group initiated a project to develop JUPITER, a conversational interface that allows users to obtain worldwide weather forecast information over the telephone using spoken dialogue. It has served as the primary research platform for our group on many issues related to human language technology, including telephone-based speech recognition, robust language understanding, language generation, dialogue modeling, and multilingual interfaces. Over a two year period since coming online in May 1997, JUPITER has received, via a toll-free number in North America, over 30000 calls (totaling over 180000 utterances), mostly from naive users. The purpose of this paper is to describe our development effort in terms of the underlying human language technologies as well as other system-related issues such as utterance rejection and content harvesting. We also present some evaluation results on the system and its components.