Abstract: Methods and apparatus are described for providing automated operator services and in particular, a reverse directory assistance service. A calling customer is connected to an automated system that prompts the caller for a listing identifier which is used by the system to retrieve a textual listing corresponding to the listing identifier from a database of textual listings. The textual listing contains a TTS ID which identifies a particular one TTS device from a plurality of TTS devices and the listing is optionally preprocessed and parsed into a plurality of fields which define the listing. The listing text is then sent to the particular one TTS device for text to speech synthesis of the text contained within the listing. The method further includes teaching the system which one TTS device of the plurality of TTS devices, best synthesizes the text contained within the listing and then identifying that one TTS device within the listing so that subsequent synthesis will utilize that TTS device.

Abstract: A name and address processor for processing text contained within an existing database for subsequent text-to-speech synthesis. The processor receives as input a listing contained within a textual source database, intelligently recognizes any fields contained within the textual source, normalizes the text contained within the fields, detects acronyms contained within the fields, identifies and marks any particular textual entries as necessitating spelling and then formats the processed text for output to a text-to-speech synthesizer. The processor processes in parallel all name field entries, address field entries, and locality field entries using tables of rules as well as both regular expression and non-regular expression methodologies.