Abstract
What should dialogue systems do while looking for information or planning their next utterance? We conducted a study in which participants listened to (constructed) conversations between a user and an information system. In one condition, the system remained silent while preparing a reply, whereas in the other, it “bought time” conversationally, using strategies from previously recorded human interactions. Participants perceived the second system as better at responding within an appropriate amount of time. Additionally, we varied between mid- and high-quality voices, and found that the high-quality voice time-buying system was also seen as more willing to help, better at understanding and more human-like than the silent system. We speculate that participants may have perceived this voice as a better match for the more human-like behavior of the second system.
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The customers’ utterances were taken from the DSG-Travel corpus [9].
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We considered 12 seconds to be a realistic waiting period a relatively lengthy lookup might take, yet not so long that the WAIT strategy would obviously be disadvantaged.
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In this study, information about duration of the wait did not make perceived waiting time shorter than actual waiting time, but it did reduce overestimation of its length in comparison to other experimental conditions.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology ‘CITEC’ (EXC 277) at Bielefeld University, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
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López Gambino, S., Zarrieß, S., Schlangen, D. (2019). Testing Strategies For Bridging Time-To-Content In Spoken Dialogue Systems. In: D'Haro, L., Banchs, R., Li, H. (eds) 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 579. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9443-0_9
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