Initiations and Interruptions in a Spoken Dialog System

Abstract

Choosing an appropriate way for a spoken dialog system to initiate a conversation is a challenging problem, and, if done incorrectly, can negatively affect people’s performance on other important tasks. We describe the results of a study in which participants play a game and are interrupted by spoken notifications in different styles. We compare people’s perceptions of the notification styles, as well as their effect on task performance. The different notifications include manipulations of pre-notifications and information about the urgency of the task. We find that pre-notifications help people respond significantly faster to urgent tasks, and that 43% of people, more than in any other category, prefer a notification style in which the notification begins by stating the urgency of the task.