ASR technologies enable microphone-equipped computing devices to interpret speech and thereby provide an alternative to conventional human-to-computer input devices such as keyboards or keypads. For example, many telecommunications devices are equipped with voice dialing features to initiate a telecommunication session. Such voice dialing features are enabled by ASR technology to detect the presence of discrete speech such as a spoken control word like a numeral or keyword, or a spoken nametag. For example, ASR may be used to match a spoken nametag with a corresponding stored nametag saved in memory of the telecommunication device to identify user-defined information such as a person. More specifically, a user may initiate a telephone call by speaking a nametag associated with a personal contact stored in an electronic address book of the telecommunication device.
But one problem encountered with voice dialing is that of confusability between similar sounding nametags. For example, when a user speaks the nametag “John,” ASR may confuse between a stored “John At Work” nametag and a stored “John” nametag. Therefore, before initially storing a new nametag, current voice dialing systems force the user to speak the new nametag in several different ways to enable a higher level of differentiation between already stored nametags. Unfortunately, however, this process repeats until the user says the new nametag in a way that is less likely to be confused with existing stored nametags. Accordingly, such repetition frustrates the user.