The Wizard of Oz: Instilling a Resilient Heart into Self-Service Business Applications

Speech enabled business applications are characterized by complex implementations that bring together language processing technologies, applications development, and end-user psychology. Resilience is critical to maintaining business to customer relationships when implementing these self-service solutions. The Wizard-of-Oz experiment is a valuable technique for simulating and building human–machine prototypes to ensure successful deployment of the completed service. This paper proposes the simplification and diffusion of the methodology to facilitate the growth in demand for automated e-business transactions.