conversational

This paper describes a physically embodied and animated user interface to an interactive call handling agent, consisting of a small wireless animatronic device in the form of a squirrel, bunny, or parrot. A software tool creates movement primitives, composes these primitives into complex behaviors, and triggers these behaviors dynamically at state changes in the conversational agent's finite state machine. Gaze and gestural cues from the animatronics alert both the user and co-located third parties of incoming phone calls, and data suggests that such alerting is less intrusive than conventional telephones.

Current asynchronous voice messaging interfaces, like voicemail, fail to take advantage of our conversational skills. TalkBack restores conversational turn-taking to voicemail retrieval by dividing voice messages into smaller sections based on the most significant silent and filled pauses and pausing after each to record a response. The responses are composed into a reply, alternating with snippets of the original message for context. TalkBack is built into a digital picture frame; the recipient touches a picture of the caller to hear each segment of the message in turn. The minimal interface models synchronous interaction and facilitates asynchronous voice messaging. TalkBack can also present a voice-annotated slide show which it receives over the Internet.

Communication is about people, not machines. But as firms and families alike spread out geographically, we rely increasingly on telecommunications tools to keep us “connected”. The challenge of such systems is to enable conversation between individuals without computational infrastructure getting in the way. This paper compares two speech-based communication systems, Phoneshell and Chatter, in how they deal with the keys to communication: proper names. Chatter, a conversational system using speech-recognition, improves upon the hierarchical nature of the touch-tone based Phoneshell by maintaining context and enabling use of anaphora. Proper names can present particular problems for speech recognizers, so an interface algorithm for reliable name specification by spelling is offered. Since individual letter recognition is non-robust, Chatter implicitly disambiguates strings of letters based on context. We hypothesize that the right interface can make faulty speech recognition as usable as TouchTones---even more so.