Interaction with an animated agent in a spoken dialogue system

The study reported in this paper is based on results from a Swedish database of spontaneous computer-directed speech. This database was investigated to determine how people adapt their language when they interact with computers. A spoken dialogue system with an animated agent, August, was installed in a public location in downtown Stockholm. Members of the general public were invited to interact with the system and dialogues were recorded. The database was collected during a period of six months and consists of transcriptions of more than ten thousand spontaneous utterances. The domain restrictions in this spoken dialogue system were minimal, and the users were not explicitly told what they could expect the system to understand. In this paper the users’ communicative strategies, as they are manifested in the input utterances, are studied. The influence of the interface design on user expectations is also discussed. Results indicate that user adaptation, as reflected in the corpus, comprises lexical as well as syntactical aspects