The 31st IPP Symposium

Natural Broker (SM): Experience with a Wireless, Multimodel System for Financial Information Access

Brad Hampson, Fidelity Investments

Natural Broker is a demonstration application that offers natural language query by voice to a financial information system that knows basic statistics about publicly traded stocks. User queries are processed into text by a conventional telephony-based speech recognition engine. The resulting text feeds into a natural language parser in the information system. The resulting data is formatted as an HTML page and delivered wirelessly to a PDA.

We will describe the business motivation for building Natural Broker, discuss its architecture, and review its strengths and weaknesses with respect to the goal of improving ease of use of PDA-based financial applications. We will also discuss what technology and infrastructure advancements will be required to make feasible a production deployment of such a system in the future.