This paper addresses the commercial, technical and user requirements for spoken dialogue technology, particularly in the context of telephony applications, and reviews progress towards the goal of conversational systems. It highlights the key markets which will be served by such technology, and examines how both engineering and human factors problems will need to be overcome before successful public-facing conversational style systems can be deployed. However, the paper offers a positive view of progress to date. Several sophisticated sub-conversational systems have already been deployed, and recent progress is encouraging.
Cite as: Peckham, J. (1995) Conversational interaction: breaking the usability barrier. Proc. ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, 1-8
@inproceedings{peckham95_sds,
author={Jeremy Peckham},
title={{Conversational interaction: breaking the usability barrier}},
year=1995,
booktitle={Proc. ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems},
pages={1--8}
}