What should your speech system say?

Even as telephone based spoken language dialogue systems (SLDS) are becoming commercially available, developers can benefit from guidelines designed to help remove dialogue problems as early as possible in the design life cycle. SLDS designers generally rely on a Wizard of Oz (WOZ) simulation technique to ensure that the system's dialogue facilitates user interaction as much as possible. In a WOZ simulation, users are made to believe they are interacting with a real system, when in fact they are interacting with a hidden researcher. These researchers record, transcribe, and analyze the dialogues, and then use the results to improve the dialogue in the SLDS being developed. Using current methods, dialogue designers must be both very careful and very lucky, or interaction problems will remain during the implementation and testing stages. We have found that a sound, comprehensive set of dialogue design guidelines is an effective tool to support systematic development and evaluation during early SLDS design. We believe guidelines could significantly reduce development time by reducing the need for lengthy WOZ experimentation, controlled user testing, and field trial cycles.