Abstract:

A majority of spoken user interfaces deal with the task of retrieving an element from a list. Conventionally, spoken UIs deal with such tasks through hierarchies of menus or dialogs, that navigate users through a series of steps, each of which present them with a limited set of choices. In a recent paper [2] we presented an alternative approach to such UIs, termed SpokenQuery, that recasts the problem of selection from lists as one of retrieval, and demonstrated that it could result in significantly lowered cognitive load on the user. In this paper, we examine various aspects of retrieval from spoken queries, and UIs based on such retrieval, and demonstrate that in addition to reducing the cognitive load on the user, the system is effective for searching large databases, is robust to environment noise, and is effective as a UI.