Developing Voice-only Applications in the Absence of Speech Recognition Technology

In this paper, we describe an information access system with a voice-only interface. We outline a design process for generating guidelines for voice-only interaction in the absence of adequate speech recognition technology. Our usability studies make use of a "Wizard of Oz" scheme to replace the missing core technology. Keywords Voice-only interaction, speech recognition, Wizard of Oz INTRODUCTION Voice recognition and synthesis provide interesting and exciting interface alternatives for application developers. To date, voice has been used primarily to augment applications with an existing visual interface (e.g., VoiceNotes [6]). There are a couple of reasons why a voice-only interface to a system might be desirable. First, the application might require a hands-free mode of interaction. Second, telephone service is one of the few truly robust and ubiquitous network technologies, so it makes sense to extend information services away from the desktop by providing a telephone interfac..