Abstract: A voice-enabled system for online shopping provides a voice and telephony interface, as well a text and graphic interface, for shopping over the Internet using a browser or a telephone. The system allows customers to access an online shop, search for desired database items, select items, and finally pay for selected items using a credit card, over a phone line or the Internet. A telephony-Internet interface converts spoken queries into electronic commands for transmission to an online shop or database. Markup language-type pages transmitted to callers from the online-shop or database are parsed to extract selected information. The selected information is then reported to the callers via audio messaging.

Abstract: A voice-optimized database system and method of audio vector valuation (AVV) provides means to search a database in response to a spoken query. Audio vectors (AVs) are assigned to phonemes in the names or phrases constituting searchable items in a voice-optimized database and in spoken queries. Multiple AVs can be stored which correspond to different pronunciations of the same searchable items to allow for less precision on the part telephone callers when stating their queries. A distance calculation is performed between the audio vectors of database items and spoken queries to produce search results. Existing databases can be enhanced with AVV. Several alternate samples of a spoken query are generated by analyzing the phonemic string of the spoken query to create similar, alternate phonemic strings. The phonemic string of the spoken query and the alternate phonemic strings are converted to text and used to search the database.