A Spoken Dialog System to Access a Newspaper Web Site

Chatbot Research and Design, 2020

This paper lays the foundation for a new delivery paradigm for web-accessible content and functionality, i.e., conversational interaction. Instead of asking users to read text, click through links and type on the keyboard, the vision is to enable users to "speak to a website" and to obtain natural language, spoken feedback. The paper describes how state-of-the-art chatbot technology can enable a dialog between the user and the website, proposes a reference architecture for the automated inference of site-specific chatbots able to mediate between the user and the website, and discusses open challenges and research questions. The envisioned, bidirectional dialog paradigm advances current screen reader technology and aims to benefit both regular users in eyes-free usage scenarios as well as visually impaired users in everyday scenarios.

Interspeech, 2007

Currently there are no dialog systems that enable purely voice-based access to the unstructured information on websites such as Wikipedia. Such systems could be revolutionary for non-literate users in the developing world. To investigate interface issues in such a system, we developed VoicePedia, a telephone-based dialog system for searching and browsing Wikipedia. In this paper, we present the system, as well as a user study comparing the use of VoicePedia to SmartPedia, a Smartphone GUI-based alternative. Keyword entry through the voice interface was significantly faster, while search result navigation, and page browsing were significantly slower. Although users preferred the GUI-based interface, task success rates between both systems were comparable-a promising result for regions where Smartphones and data plans are not viable.

Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96, 1996

Dialog management is of particular importance in telephone-based services. In this paper we describe our recent activities in dialog management and natural language generation in the LIMSI RAIL-TEL system for access to rail travel information. The aim of LE-MLAP project RAILTEL was to assess the capabilities of spoken language technology for interactive telephone information services. Because all interaction is over the telephone, oral dialog management and response generation are very important aspects of the overall system design and usability. Each dialog is analysed to determine the source of any errors (speech recognition, understanding, information retreival, processing, or dialog management). An analysis is provided for 100 dialogs taken from the RAILTEL field trials with naive subjects accessing timetable information.

… Conference on Spoken …

We present findings from the long-term study of a speech-based bus timetable system. After the deployment of the prototype system we have collected data from real usage for 30 months. In addition, we have conducted usability tests to get subjective ratings of the pilot system. The comparison of these evaluations shows that the results obtained with usability tests differ significantly from those gained from the real usage, and the data of the initial use differs significantly from the data collected after that. For example, the differences in help requests, interruptions, speech recognition rejections, silence timeouts, and repeat requests are highly significant, and in some cases, such as explicit quit requests, enormous (65% versus 3%).

In spoken dialog systems, information must be presented sequentially, making it difficult to quickly browse through a large number of options. Recent studies have shown that user satisfaction is negatively correlated with dialog duration, suggesting that systems should be designed to maximize the efficiency of the interactions. Analysis of the logs of 2000 dialogs between users and nine different dialog systems reveals that a large percentage of the time is spent on the information presentation phase, and thus there is potentially a large pay-off to be gained from optimizing information presentation in spoken dialog systems. This article proposes a method that improves the efficiency of coping with large numbers of diverse options by selecting options and then structuring them based on a model of the user’s preferences. This enables the dialog system to automatically determine trade-offs between alternative options that are relevant to the user and present these trade-offs explicitly. Multiple attractive options are thereby structured such that the user can gradually refine her request to find the optimal trade-off. To evaluate and challenge our approach, we conducted a series of experiments that test the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. Experimental results show that basing the content structuring and content selection process on a user model increases the efficiency and effective- ness of the user’s interaction. Users complete their tasks more successfully and more quickly. Furthermore, user surveys revealed that participants found that the user-model based system presents complex trade-offs understandably and increases overall user satisfaction. The experiments also indicate that presenting users with a brief overview of options that do not fit their requirements significantly improves the user’s overview of available options, also making them feel more confident in having been presented with all relevant options.

2007

Currently there are no dialog systems that enable purely voice-based access to the unstructured information on websites such as Wikipedia. Such systems could be revolutionary for non-literate users in the developing world. To investigate interface issues in such a system, we developed VoicePedia, a telephone-based dialog system for searching and browsing Wikipedia. In this paper, we present the system, as well as a user study comparing the use of VoicePedia to SmartPedia, a Smartphone GUI-based alternative. Keyword entry through the voice interface was significantly faster, while search result navigation, and page browsing were significantly slower. Although users preferred the GUI-based interface, task success rates between both systems were comparable -a promising result for regions where Smartphones and data plans are not viable.

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2011

Users of digital libraries and other information systems typically carry out searches with very short queries, on the order of two words or so. This makes it very difficult for the systems to disambiguate their queries and identify potentially relevant documents, resulting in sub-optimal retrieval performance. We hypothesize that users will provide better and more useful descriptions of their information problems if they are able to speak to the system and easily indicate through speech and gesture those documents and aspects of documents which they find useful, and not useful. In this paper, a spoken interface is described, and a planned wizard of oz study will be introduced.

Web Engineered …, 2011

1996

Spoken language systems allow users to interact with computers by speaking to them. This paper focuses on the most advanced systems, which seek to allow as natural a style of interaction as possible. Specifically this means the use of continuous speech recognition-natural language understanding to interpret the utterance, and an intelligent dialogue manager which allows a flexible style of 'conversation' between computer and user. This paper discusses the architecture of spoken language systems and the components of which they are made, and describes both a variety of possible approaches and the particular design decisions made in some systems developed at BT Laboratories. Three spoken language systems in the course of development are described-a multimodal interface to the BT Business Catalogue, an e-mail secretary which can be consulted over the telephone network, and a multimodal system to allow selection of films in the interactive TV environment.

The objective of our work is the development of a natural language dialogue system for information retrieval with multimodal input and multimedia output. Overall, the system consists of three phases: input analysis, information and knowledge management and output generation. The dialogue system is designed for consulting old Mexican historical documents. In this paper we describe the designed architecture of each of the three phases.