Extending accurate trip information to mobile commuters is a large area of opportunity for transit agencies around the world. Now the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) will deploy an automated speech recognition from Nuance to shorten wait times, with hope, expand the reach of its “Trip Planner” service to the thousands more New Yorkers dialing 718-330-1234.

Use of Trip Planner on the MTA’s Web site has increased dramatically over the past year. The agency reports that 18,045 people use Trip Planner “daily” in April 2009, a nearly 172% increase of the 6,640 daily users in 2008. At the same time, over 4,500 “customers” call Gotham’s Travel Information Center (TIC), on average each day. The purpose of Trip Planner Voice is to use speech automation to reduce these callers’ wait times and, thus serve more callers.

It’s early, but the uptake has been impressive: Since a controled “beta” version of the service was introduced last September, over 95,000 callers have used the service. During that time, the number of daily users increased from 382 to 746 (which, by our estimates, represents an annualized increase of 127%).

The service is an integration of Nuance’s speech recognition with a traveler information platform from Trapeze Group. It is integrated on a call handling and information management platform from Aspect Software. The deployment (coordinated by Aspect), takes a classic “form filling” approach. It prompts each caller to say his or her point of origin and destination
by address, intersection, or landmark and then provides travel instructions based bus, subway or Staten Island Railway schedule information.

Today, the service can handle 96 simultaneous users. It is offered in American English only, but a Spanish version is under development.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, mobile search, Nuance