Subjective experiments on influence of response timing in spoken dialogues

Abstract

To verify the validity of analysis results relating to dialogue rhythm from earlier studies, we produced spoken dialogues based on analysis results relating to response timing and the other spoken dialogues, and performed subjective experiments to investigateparameters suchas the naturalness of the dialogue, the incongruity of the synthesized speech, and the ease of comprehension of the utterances. We used very short task-oriented four-turn dialogues using synthesized speech in Experiment 1, and approx. one-minute free-conversation dialogues in Experiment 2 using natural human speech and synthesized speech. As a result, we were able to show that a natural response timing exists for utterances, and that response timings that conform to the utterance contents are felt to be more natural, thus demonstrating the validity of the analysis results relating to dialogue rhythm. Index Terms: Speech analysis, Speech communication, Interactive systems, User interface human factors, User interfaces