MOVING THE CONVERSATION forward

At SpeechTEK West in San Francisco last year, a group of voice user interface designers participated in a workshop directed by James Larson of Larson Technical Services and Lizanne Kaiser of Genesys Communications Laboratories. Participants developed recommendations for dealing with error messages in speech applications. This is the third in a series of four articles summarizing the recommendations reached by these experts. Analyzing human-to-human conversations shows that with such conversations, errors are just as likely as they are with a speech recognition application. Based on patterns that can be observed in human-to-human conversations, they present several strategies to give speech applications the same capability to get past errors and to successfully continue a call: 1. Give the user visibility into what is going on. 2. Ignore errors in noncritical parts of the dialogue. 3. Use smart reprompting for partial information. 4. Turn barge-in off where possible.