Two salient properties of user behavior make Help Desk a unique speech application different from the more general transactional kind: (a) majority of users have only vague ideas about their problem, and (b) these users are likely to context-switch (change discourse topic) during the course of a dialog. We describe a conversational Help Desk natural language call routing application and show how the alignment of Voice User Interface (VUI), Grammar Development, and Application Architecture results in a conversational user interface that is able to guide the vague user in the most optimal way while being flexible to allow mid-discourse context switches. Usability evaluation confirms the peculiar user behavior and provides empirical evidence that users perception of time in a speech application can be influenced by the dialog; in this case, Help Desk users tend not to become impatient going through three-five dialog turns, as long as dialog is progressing toward problem-resolution.
Cite as: Stewart, O., Huerta, J., Jan, E.-E., Wu, C., Li, X., Lubensky, D. (2006) Conversational help desk: vague callers and context switch. Proc. Interspeech 2006, paper 1291-Wed2FoP.2, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2006-525
@inproceedings{stewart06_interspeech,
author={Osamuyimen Stewart and Juan Huerta and Ea-Ee Jan and Cheng Wu and Xiang Li and David Lubensky},
title={{Conversational help desk: vague callers and context switch}},
year=2006,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2006},
pages={paper 1291-Wed2FoP.2},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2006-525}
}