EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Comparing the Usability of a User Driven and a Mixed Initiative Multimodal Dialogue System for Train Timetable Information

Janienke Sturm (1), Ilse Bakx (2), Bert Cranen (1), Jacques Terken (2)

(1) University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
(2) University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands

The aim of the study presented in this paper was to compare the usability of a user driven and a mixed initiative user interface of a multimodal system for train timetable information. The evaluation shows that the effectiveness of the two interfaces does not differ significantly. However, as a result of the absence of spoken prompts and the obligatory use of buttons to provide values, the efficiency of the user driven interface is much higher than the efficiency of the mixed initiative interface. Although the user satisfaction was not significantly higher for the user driven interface, by far most people preferred the user driven interface to the mixed initiative interface.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Sturm, Janienke / Bakx, Ilse / Cranen, Bert / Terken, Jacques (2003): "Comparing the usability of a user driven and a mixed initiative multimodal dialogue system for train timetable information", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 2245-2248.