Quality Aspects of Multimodal Dialog Systems: Identity, Stimulation and Success

So far, not much is known on the relationship of quality aspects of multimodal dialog systems. This paper aims at closing this gap by analyzing the influence of input and output modalities on the systems’ usability. The underlying study has been carried out with a smart-home system offering speech, gesture and touch as well as the combination of these three for input and a speech-to-text system, a TV screen and a smartphone screen for output. The results indicate that the usability of a multimodal system is composed of hedonic and pragmatic aspects. The hedonic aspects are influenced by the identity transported by the output channels and the stimulation of the input modalities. A measure for task success was sufficient to describe the pragmatic aspect.