Towards a universal speech interface
Roni Rosenfeld, Xiaojin Zhu, Arthur R. Toth, Stefanie Shriver, Kevin Lenzo, Alan W. Black · 2000
We discuss our ongoing attempt to design and evaluate universal human-machine speech-based interfaces. We describe one such initial design suitable for database retrieval applications, and discuss its implementation in a movie information application prototype. Initial user studies provided encouraging results regarding the usability of the design, as well as suggest some questions for further investigation. 1. INTRODUCTION Speech recognition technology has made spoken interaction with machines feasible. However, no suitable universal interaction paradigm has yet been proposed for humans to communicate effectively, efficiently and effortlessly by voice with machines. On one hand, natural language applications have been demonstrated in narrow domains, but building such systems is data-, labor- and expertise-intensive. Perhaps more importantly, unconstrained natural language severely strains recognition technology, and fails to delineate the functional limitations of the machine. On th...