Yelling at Your TV
Raphael Tang, Ferhan Türe, Jimmy Lin · 2019
Millions of consumers issue voice queries through television-based entertainment systems such as the Comcast X1, the Amazon Fire TV, and Roku TV. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are responsible for transcribing these voice queries into text to feed downstream natural language understanding modules. However, ASR is far from perfect, often producing incorrect transcriptions and forcing users to take corrective action. To better understand their impact on sessions, this paper characterizes speech recognition errors as well as subsequent user responses. We provide both quantitative and qualitative analyses, examining the acoustic as well as lexical attributes of the utterances. This work represents, to our knowledge, the first analysis of speech recognition errors from real users on a widely-deployed entertainment system.