User's experience of a commercial speech dialogue system

Following up with the speech technology development, spoken dialogue systems are getting commercialized. Many public transportation companies, call centres, tourist information centres, etc are using spoken dialogue systems instead of the touch-tone telecommunication system for customer communication. However, there are many usability problems with the public application of spoken dialogue systems. An evaluation of a Swedish dialog system is conducted through a test with six users who went through three different scenarios in a home environment. The results came from analysis of the subjects’ conversation with the dialogue system, and from observations, interviews and questionnaires. The result shows that the system is functional, since all the users concluded their tasks. However, there are a few usability problems that need improvement, such as the understanding between the user and the system, the systems flexibility, naturalness, and correctness, as well as the amount of information, error handling and the users control of the system. Concerning the users’ experience, the study showed that variables such as elegance, emotion, encouragement, intelligence or personality were not present. These variables would affect users’ attitude towards the system.