Telephone based speech interfaces in the developing world, from the perspective of human-human communication

Abstract

Telephone-based information services hold tremendous potential as a means of information access in the developing world. However,surprisingly little research has been done on the design of such systems - whether basic Interactive Voice Response systems, or more sophisticated systems using speech recognition and speech synthesis. We report on theoretical work, based on research by C Nass, as well as experiments aimed at addressing this situation. We have found that the design of telephone-based services can benefit significantly from detailed consideration of the characteristics of human-human communication. This appears to be particularly true in the developing world