Spoken Natural Language Dialogue Systems: User Interface Issues for the Future

Abstract

Technology advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) in recent years have brought us closer to achieving the goal of communicating with machines via unconstrained, natural speech. Until recently, most applications of speech recognition technology required that the user know a restricted set of command words. In contrast, the research system that is described in this chapter can understand and act upon fluently spoken language. This markedly changes the nature of the dialogue between the human and the computer. The objective of this research is to evaluate user interface design alternatives for these new natural spoken dialogues between humans and machines. In this chapter the focus is on a particular experimental vehicle, that of automatically routing telephone calls based on a user’s fluently spoken answer to the question “How may I help you? ”. This chapter summarizes results from several studies conducted to determine how best to design the user interface for a spoken natural dialogue system.