Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems August 28-31, 2003 Château d'Oex, Vaud, Switzerland

User Interface Design for Spoken Dialog Systems

Mike Phillips

Speechworks, USA

SpeechWorks has been involved in the development and deployment of over 300 telephone-based Speech applications. With many of these systems, we have been able to gather extensive usage data, including details of how users respond to the various system prompts, statistics of overall success rates, and in some cases, post-usage interviews and surveys to learn what users like or dislike about these systems. This experience has given us the firm belief that the most important factor in the success of these systems is the design of the application and the associated user interface. While there is still a relationship between the technology performance and the success of the application, in most cases, the technology performs well and most application improvements come from improvements to the user interface. This includes ensuring a match between user expectations and application capabilities, tuning the wording and prosodics of the system prompts, and establishing error handling and confirmation strategies and thresholds. In this talk, I will provide examples of these systems, along with the approach used to design, develop, and deploy successful speech interfaces.

Bibliographic reference.  Phillips, Mike (2003): "User interface design for spoken dialog systems", In EHSD-2003, 145 (Abstract).