Speech Completion: New Speech Interface with On-demand Completion Assistance

This paper describes a novel speech interface function, called speech completion, that helps a user enter a word or phrase by completing (filling in the rest of) a phrase fragment uttered by the user. Although the concept of completion has been widely used in text-based interfaces, effective completion for speech has not been proposed. We enable a user to invoke the speech-completion function intentionally and effortlessly by building an interface that displays completion candidates when a filled pause is uttered (a vowel is lengthened) during a phrase. The filled pause can be considered a nonverbal modality that has not been used in speech input interfaces. In our experience with a system that includes a filled-pause detector and a speech recognizer capable of listing completion candidates, the effectiveness of speech completion was confirmed.