Spoken Dialog Training System for Customer Service Improvement

In the hospitality industry, including convenience stores and airport service counters, operational staff must be trained to serve customers satisfactorily and to avoid problems with them. This study investigates a spoken dialog training system for improving customer service by operational staff. In a conventional spoken dialog system, a system user uses the dialog system as a customer, and the dialog agent assists the system user in fulfilling his or her requirements. In our system, in contrast, the dialog agent plays the role of the customer. Consequently, the behaviors of the human and the customer are opposite to those in a traditional dialog system, and there has thus far been no research on such systems. This paper introduces a prototype of such a system that we have developed and describes a simple experiment. The results of the experiment confirm the usefulness of our system for hospitality training.