Usability of Speech Dialog Systems


Book Description

Before designing a speech application system, three key questions have to be answered: who will use it, why and how often? This book focuses on these high-level questions and gives a criteria of when and how to design speech systems. After an introduction, the state-of-the-art in modern voice user interfaces is displayed. The book goes on to evolve criteria for designing and evaluating successful voice user interfaces. Trends in this fast growing area are also presented.




Practical Spoken Dialog Systems


Book Description

For professional speech researchers, there is a rich technical literature covering many years of primary research in speech. However, this literature is not necessarily applicable to the needs of business people, application developers, and students who are interested in learning about the practical uses of speech technology. On the other hand, while existing introductory resources cover the basic mechanics of development of application development as well as aspects of the voice user interface, they don’t go far enough in dealing with the details that have to be taken into account to make spoken dialog systems successful in practice. What’s missing is information in between the in-depth technical literature and the more introductory development resources. The goal of this book is to provide information for anyone who wants to take the next step beyond the basics of current speech applications but isn’t yet ready to dive into the technical literature. It is hoped that this book will help project managers, application developers, and students gain a fuller and more complete understanding of spoken dialog technology and the practical aspects of developing and deploying spoken dialog applications.




Spoken Dialogue Systems


Book Description

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the development of dialogue systems that support robust and efficient human-machine interaction using spoken language. Spoken dialogue technology allows various interactive applications to be built and used for practical purposes, and research focuses on issues that aim to increase the system's communicative competence by including aspects of error correction, cooperation, multimodality, and adaptation in context. This book gives a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art techniques that are used to build spoken dialogue systems. It provides an overview of the basic issues such as system architectures, various dialogue management methods, system evaluation, and also surveys advanced topics concerning extensions of the basic model to more conversational setups. The goal of the book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in dialogue system development and evaluation. It presents dialogue modelling and system development issues relevant in both academic and industrial environments and also discusses requirements and challenges for advanced interaction management and future research. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction to Spoken Dialogue Systems / Dialogue Management / Error Handling / Case Studies: Advanced Approaches to Dialogue Management / Advanced Issues / Methodologies and Practices of Evaluation / Future Directions / References / Author Biographies




Estimating Spoken Dialog System Quality with User Models


Book Description

Spoken dialog systems have the potential to offer highly intuitive user interfaces, as they allow systems to be controlled using natural language. However, the complexity inherent in natural language dialogs means that careful testing of the system must be carried out from the very beginning of the design process. This book examines how user models can be used to support such early evaluations in two ways: by running simulations of dialogs, and by estimating the quality judgments of users. First, a design environment supporting the creation of dialog flows, the simulation of dialogs, and the analysis of the simulated data is proposed. How the quality of user simulations may be quantified with respect to their suitability for both formative and summative evaluation is then discussed. The remainder of the book is dedicated to the problem of predicting quality judgments of users based on interaction data. New modeling approaches are presented, which process the dialogs as sequences, and which allow knowledge about the judgment behavior of users to be incorporated into predictions. All proposed methods are validated with example evaluation studies.




Simulation-Based Usability Evaluation of Spoken and Multimodal Dialogue Systems


Book Description

This book describes an extension of the user behaviour simulation (UBS) of an existing tool for automatic usability evaluation (AUE). This extension is based upon a user study with a smart home system. It uses technical-sociological methods for the execution of the study and the analysis of the collected data. A comparison of the resulting UBS with former UBSs, as well as the empirical data, shows that the new simulation approach outperforms the former simulation. The improvement affects the prediction of dialogue metrics that are related to dialogue efficiency and dialogue effectiveness. Furthermore, the book describes a parameter-based data model, as well as a related framework. Both are used to uniformly describe multimodal human-computer interactions and to provide such descriptions for usability evaluations. Finally, the book proposes a new two-stage method for the evaluation of UBSs. The method is based on the computation of a distance measures between two dialogue corpora and the pair-wise comparison of distances among several dialogue corpora.




Natural Language Dialog Systems and Intelligent Assistants


Book Description

This book covers state-of-the-art topics on the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems and intelligent assistants in everyday applications. It presents scientific achievements in language processing that result in the development of successful applications and addresses general issues regarding the advances in Spoken Dialog Systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. Emphasis is placed on the following topics: speaker/language recognition, user modeling / simulation, evaluation of dialog system, multi-modality / emotion recognition from speech, speech data mining, language resource and databases, machine learning for spoken dialog systems and educational and healthcare applications.




Spoken Dialogue Technology


Book Description

Spoken Dialogue Technology provides extensive coverage of spoken dialogue systems, ranging from the theoretical underpinnings of the study of dialogue through to a detailed look at a number of well-established methods and tools for developing spoken dialogue systems. The book enables students and practitioners to design and test dialogue systems using several available development environments and languages, including the CSLU toolkit, VoiceXML, SALT, and XHTML+ voice. This practical orientation is usually available otherwise only in reference manuals supplied with software development kits. The latest research in spoken dialogue systems is presented along with extensive coverage of the most relevant theoretical issues and a critical evaluation of current research prototypes. A dedicated web site containing supplementary materials, code, links to resources will enable readers to develop and test their own systems (). Previously such materials have been difficult to track down, available only on a range of disparate web sites and this web site provides a unique and useful reference source which will prove invaluable.




HCI and Usability for e-Inclusion


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of HCI and Usability for e-Inclusion, held as the 5th Symposium of the Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society, USAB 2009, in Linz, Austria, in November 2009. The 12 revised full papers and 26 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on gender and cognitive performance, usefulness, usability, accessibility, emotion, confidence and elderly, usability testing, evaluation, measurement, education, learning and e-inclusion, design for adaptive content processing, grounded theory, activity theory and situated action, smart home, health and ambient assistent living, user centred design and usability practice, interaction, assistive technologies and virtual environments, communication, interfaces and haptic technology as well as new technologies and challenges for people with disabilities.







Spoken Multimodal Human-Computer Dialogue in Mobile Environments


Book Description

This book is based on publications from the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments held at Kloster Irsee, Germany, in 2002. The workshop covered various aspects of devel- ment and evaluation of spoken multimodal dialogue systems and components with particular emphasis on mobile environments, and discussed the state-- the-art within this area. On the development side the major aspects addressed include speech recognition, dialogue management, multimodal output gene- tion, system architectures, full applications, and user interface issues. On the evaluation side primarily usability evaluation was addressed. A number of high quality papers from the workshop were selected to form the basis of this book. The volume is divided into three major parts which group together the ov- all aspects covered by the workshop. The selected papers have all been - tended, reviewed and improved after the workshop to form the backbone of the book. In addition, we have supplemented each of the three parts by an invited contribution intended to serve as an overview chapter.