The design of speech-interactive dialogs for transaction-automation systems

Abstract

The use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to automate telephone-service transactions provides opportunities for significant operational cost savings, as well as for improvements in the quality of customer service. At GTE, our focus has been on developing speech-interactive systems, named OASIS, for service-order transactions. In this paper, we discuss our methodology for developing dialogs, describe the dialog developed for our service-disconnect application, and present data from a field trial of the disconnect system. Our design methodology addresses development of a transaction model, specification of dialog flow, design of language structures, and construction of system speech. In addition, following our approach, dialog flow and recognition vocabularies are developed in the context of the system recognition and interpretation capabilities. Primary attributes of our methodology include the following: structured representation of conversational transactions as a progressive flow of information elements; query language that follows the style of discourse to elicit predictable responses; use of recognition outcomes and corresponding system actions to define dialog flow; and generation of scalable solutions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we present results from the service-disconnect field trial. In general, users responded cooperatively, adhered to the structured interaction, rarely anticipated future information, and provided on-target answers to system queries.