Two studies of open vs. directed dialog strategies in spoken dialog systems

This paper analyzes the behavior of callers responding to a speech recognition system when prompted either with an open or a directed dialog strategy. The results of two usability studies with different caller populations are presented. Differences between the results from the two studies are analyzed and are shown to arise from the differences in the domains. It is shown that it depends on the caller population whether an open or a directed dialog strategy is preferred. In addition, we examine the effect of additional informational prompts on the routability of caller utterances.