Spoken versus Written Queries for Mobile Information Access

Ease of browsing and searching for information on mobile devices has been an area of increasing interest in the information retrieval (IR) research community. While some work has been done to enhance the usability of handwriting recognition to input queries, the characteristics of speech as an input mechanism have not been extensively studied. It is intuitive to think that users would speak more words when issuing their queries due to the ease of speech when they are enabled to form queries via voice to an information retrieval system than forming queries in written form. Is this in fact the case in reality? This paper presents some new findings derived from an experimental study to test this intuition, and assesses the feasibility of the spoken queries for the search purposes.