TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. Optimizing Software Architecture for Voice Search SpeechTek 2007

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 2 Agenda  What is Voice Search?  Example of Voice Search applications  Different types of Voice Search Designs  Challenges of developing a Voice Search Application  Solutions to tackle those challenges  Technique for building an ad-based Voice Search Application  Demo

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 3 What is Voice Search? Speak the Query & Get the Search Result

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 4 Voice Search Applications  Directory Assistance  Business Name or Category Search  Locator & Driving Direction  Information Search  News or sports query  Stock quotes  Traffic & weather  Content Search  Music & Ring tones  Video Clips  Web Search with Voice Control

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 5 Voice Search Designs  Pure Voice Search  User speaks the query and the system returns the query result through voice  Best use for telematics or any hands-free non-visual environment  Multi-modal Voice Search  User speaks the query and the system returns the query result to the delivery channels other than voice  Best use for lookup service that returns long or hard-to-remember result set

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 6 Voice Search Approaches  Open-end voice search  Natural language based connotative queries  High word error rates for large vocabulary sizes  Limited context to leverage for improving speech recognition  Multi-step hierarchical voice search  Keyword based denotative queries  Dialog driven  High word error rates for large vocabulary sizes  Takes longer to navigate through the dialogs to get result

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 7 Voice Search Nirvana  Open-end voice search interface  Support a wide-range of voice vocabulary and phrases  Low recognition error rate  Able to leverage contextual information to improve speech recognition  Real-time performance

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 8 Voice Search Challenges  Really Short Query  Really Long Query  Dealing with Homonyms  Ad vs. Add  Oral vs. Aural  Dealing with Acronyms  DOS  NASA

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 9 Voice Search Solution  Intent Identification technology  Match recognized raw user utterance against a context sensitive semantic index  Identify a short list of the most likely intents  Prompt the user with intelligent follow-up question to narrow down the intent identification Consumer utterance: “Closing costs” System question: “Are you searching for mortgage information?”  Formulate the query once the intent is locked  Render the query result to the preferred channel for delivery

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 10 Voice Search Design  Understand the application  Front-end Interface  Backend Search Engine  Identify the target users  Collect the possible utterances and build the grammar around it  Open-end vs. Dialog driven  Coverage vs. Predictive power

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 11 Voice Search Design -- A Level Deeper  Leverage the historical dataset from existing web query infrastructure to increase the speech recognition accuracy  Develop grammar based upon the web query logs  Expand the grammar with ontology for connotative recognition  Leverage contextual & profiling data  Caller ID, device type  DNIS, LBS, CRM lookup,  Search keywords, search result and call flow history For ad targeting

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 12 Voice Search Design -- A System Architecture Apptera Application Server

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 13 Voice Search Demo Free-411 “Category” Example

TECHNOLOGY FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING SEARCH & COMMERCE © 2007 Apptera Inc. 14 Free-411 Demo: Category Ad with Directions $1.25 Bid $1.00 Bid What city and state? __________ What listing? ____________ Restaurants Denver, CO __ Business __ Residence  $1.50 Bid