

Speech-Based, Natural Language Conversational Recommender Systems - buovjaga
http://grasch.net/node/147

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dvirsky
This is really impressive, but personally I'd rather interact with such agents
in typed text, at least as the input method. But maybe I'm just too old.

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joe_the_user
No, I think tend to think your preferences are common.

Until a robot voice gets an appealing personality that people enjoy talking
to, people will avoid interacting with "robo voices" if at all possible. Even
though may interactions with voice recognition applications have reached the
point of being "seamless", I still dislike the things.

Another factor is that voice isn't very desirable for things that involve only
formally specifying something. If you type out the key word-preferences for
recommendations, you can see what they are and change them easily. If you
interact by voice, you'd need to have your preferences tediously read back to
you.

Even if a person has a human assistant to perform various chores for them, the
value of that assistant would derive from being able to make choices wouldn't
want to overtly make or think about yourself - someone who would buy clothes
for a person with no interest in fashion but needed to look good for example.
Even in this case, you'd want the preferences for your assistant spelled out
so much as it made sense. Once robot voices pleasant enough, they'll probably
still want to supplement any interactions with "notes about the conversation"
that the person could also edit.

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bedahr
Author of the system here.

I do agree that speech-based interfaces can be very cumbersome. Part of this
is that current systems aren't perfect yet but part of it is also that
speaking aloud is just plain strenuous for people. At least the second thing
isn't going to go away.

Some of the things you touched on are certainly valid points, but spoken
language systems also have big advantages. For example, having to spend effort
for fully form a thought (to articulate it coherently), forces users to spend
a second think about what they actually want. Also, and this was a part of
this research, the spoken voice carries quite cool side-channel information
that can be exploited in aiding recommendation.

In any case, please note that the current UI (which, btw, did show the
gathered preferences to some extend by coloring / bolding the shown specs
proportionally to the level of satisfaction of your determined preferences /
the level of influence) is just a research UI. It does not implement the best
I could do, but rather implements an interface that I allowed good
interpretability of the results of the conducted study (which, for example,
excluded any multi-modal efforts which would have potentially made drawing
conclusions harder).

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vishnuvram
Pretty interesting work. Thanks for sharing !

