Data processing: speech signal processing – linguistics – language – Speech signal processing – Application
Patent
1998-04-03
2000-08-22
Hudspeth, David R.
Data processing: speech signal processing, linguistics, language
Speech signal processing
Application
704270, 705 37, G10L 1522, H04M 350
Patent
active
061086320
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to transaction support apparatus; particularly, but not exclusively, to apparatus for use in financial transactions.
2. Related Art
It is known to perform transactions in shares, currency or other financial commodities in a dealing room. A known dealing room consists of a number of human dealers located around a large circle. Each human dealer is typically equipped with a computer terminal, a telephone, a pair of indicator lights of different colours (one indicating a desire to sell and one indicating a desire to buy), and a number of cards with which to indicate the client party, or other information.
On receipt of an instruction to buy or sell a quantity of a particular commodity, the dealer concerned turns on the light to indicate the corresponding wish to buy or sell, and then starts to negotiate with other dealers by gestures, signals and speech. Often, to complete one transaction, the dealer may need to buy from or sell to a number of other dealers to make up a cumulative total.
When the deal is agreed, each dealer makes a note of the details of the deal on paper, and relays the details by telephone to his client. The details are collected later by a messenger and are input to dealing system which executes the transfers of the commodities between the clients.
The dealer's telephones may intermittently be monitored and recorded onto tape.
During busy periods, it becomes difficult to keep track of all deal details and to ensure that they are promptly input into the dealing computer whilst keeping up with the volume of transactions.
Various proposals have been made for automating transactions, so as to replace the human interaction with interaction via computer terminals.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
In a first aspect, the present invention is however intended to provide apparatus to support transactions to be performed by human operators, so as to improve the efficiency of human to human communication whilst maintaining many aspects of their current way of working.
In a second aspect, the present invention is concerned with the provision of transaction support apparatus in which humans communicate via computer terminals, whilst retaining some elements of human-human interaction.
In one specific aspect, the invention aims to improve the reliability and efficiency with which deals are recorded. This is achieved by the provision of speech recognition apparatus adjacent each dealer, advantageously connected to his telephone. It is advantageous that the apparatus should also be capable of performing speaker or voice recognition, thus adding an extra element of security to the system. Advantageously, some means of confirming the details of the deal which has been recognised may be provided, and this may be in the form of a visual display, or in the form of a synthetic speech recital.
In another specific aspect, the invention aims to improve the reliability and efficiency with which deals are recorded by providing a digital speech recording unit to record the confirmatory telephone conversations from each dealer, and to supply the recorded digital telephone conversation files to a transcription terminal at which they may be replayed and the details extracted for data entry. Advantageously, this is combined with the first specific aspect of the invention and only those parts of calls for which speech recognition has not been completely successful are thus transcribed. Conveniently, where digital data on values of parameters of the call are already available (for example via speech recognition), such values are transmitted as a single file along with the recorded speech.
In known dealing rooms, it is possible for several deals to be conducted simultaneously. The efficiency of a market increases with the number of dealers, but the efficiency of human communication sets a limit on the size of the dealing room beyond which dealing is not reliably possible; this typically occurs at around 14-18 people.
In another aspect, the invention aims
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Bradley Laurence Daniel
Fisher Kim James
Gell Michael Anthony
Reeder Anthony Andrew
British Telecommunications public limited company
Hudspeth David R.
Smits Talivaldis Ivars
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