Abstract: With interactive voice response services, it can be frustrating for a user to become stuck in a dialogue where the same question is asked repetitively. Here the wording of questions used by the system are varied throughout the dialogue depending upon how many times a user has visited a particular dialogue state during the call history. Furthermore the wording of the question is also varied in dependence upon the way in which the question was asked the last time the user was in a particular dialogue state.

Abstract: With interactive voice response services, it can be frustrating for a user to become stuck in a dialogue where the same question is asked repetitively. In his invention the wording of questions used by the system are varied throughout a dialogue depending upon how many times a user has visited a dialogue state ever in their call history. Furthermore the wording of the question is also varied in dependence upon the way in which the question was asked the last time the user was in a particular dialogue state.

Abstract: With interactive voice response services, there are many different ways of asking for the same thing. In this invention the service learns the way in which a user usually asks for certain services and modifies a user specific grammar accordingly. This has the effect of increasing the accuracy of the speech recognition by reducing the number of variants which are expected. The system works well as long as the user does not suddenly start to use new words. In an improved version, the user specific grammar is checked periodically and modified if the user has introduced new words.