User acceptance and preference for advanced voice services features and dialogue styles

Abstract

The experiment evaluates several alternatives for the design of user dialogues of a telephone system which integrates advanced features to accelerate access to telephone services and also Spoken Speed Dial, Call Answering and Call Delivery. In the experiment, subjects placed phone calls and relayed pieces of information. The dialogue they then encountered presented them with experimental variations of dialogue styles and provided an opportunity to use the Spoken Speed Dial feature. Subjects made 16 call attempts in the first phase of the experiment, and their preferences for dialogue features were recorded between trial blocks and at the end of the experiment. In a second phase, subjects were the recipients of Call Delivery of various types. The results show clear preference for verbal prompts, the usability of Spoken Speed Dial, conflicting attitudes towards the extra step of recording the recipient's name in Call Answering, and a preferred mode of Call Delivery.