An Analysis of Dialogue Repair in Virtual Voice Assistants
This work addresses the problem of improving communication reliability in voice assistants for users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing human-human repair research.
The study analyzed how virtual voice assistants handle dialogue repair compared to humans, finding differences in repair strategies between human-assistant and human-human dialogues, as well as variations among assistants and languages.
Language speakers often use what are known as repair initiators to mend fundamental disconnects that occur between them during verbal communication. Previous research in this field has mainly focused on the human-to-human use of repair initiator. We proposed an examination of dialogue repair structure wherein the dialogue initiator is human and the party that initiates or responds to the repair is a virtual assistant. This study examined the use of repair initiators in both English and Spanish with two popular assistants, Google Assistant and Apple's Siri. Our aim was to codify the differences, if any, in responses by voice assistants to dialogues in need of repair as compared to human-human dialogues also in need of repair. Ultimately the data demonstrated that not only were there differences between human-assistant and human-human dialogue repair strategies, but that there were likewise differences among the assistants and the languages studied.