VoicePedia: Towards Speech-based Access to Unstructured Information
- J. Sherwani ,
- Dong Yu ,
- Tim Paek ,
- Mary Czerwinski ,
- Yun-Cheng Ju ,
- Alex Acero ,
- Y. C. Ju
Interspeech |
Published by International Speech Communication Association
Currently there are no dialog systems that enable purely voice-based access to the unstructured information on websites such as Wikipedia. Such systems could be revolutionary for non-literate users in the developing world. To investigate interface issues in such a system, we developed VoicePedia, a telephone-based dialog system for searching and browsing Wikipedia. In this paper, we present the system, as well as a user study comparing the use of VoicePedia to SmartPedia, a Smartphone GUI-based alternative. Keyword entry through the voice interface was significantly faster, while search result navigation, and page browsing were significantly slower. Although users preferred the GUI-based interface, task success rates between both systems were comparable – a promising result for regions where Smartphones and data plans are not viable.
Index Terms: dialog system, information access
© 2007 ISCA. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the ISCA and/or the author.