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Usability in Telephony Voice User Interfaces
Yacoub, Sherif
HPL-2003-27
External - Copyright Consideration
Keyword(s): voice user interfaces; VUI; VoiceXML; voice dialog design; usability and human machine interaction
Abstract: The maturity of speech related technologies, as in speech recognition and synthesis, is effectively impacting the adoption rate of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems at the enterprise scale as well as the (telecom) operator scale. However, it is not the technology maturity that solely impacts the growth of a business; end-users have to be satisfied with applications utilizing these technologies. In IVR systems, users interact with machines in a conversational dialog over a phone connection. The design of such dialogs affects the quality of service offered by the IVR system. Hence, Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) should be carefully designed with high quality usability measures. In this paper, we analyze the factors that affect the usability of VUIs. We illustrate some key differences in the design of VUIs as compared to GUI designs. We classify the factors affecting the usability of a VUI dialog design into the following categories: dialog navigation, dialog structure, conversation style, prompts, help provision, and error handling. This work presents an initial step towards creating a complete usability framework for VUIs.
19 Pages
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