Providing support for mobile calendaring conversations: a wizard of oz evaluation of dual--purpose speech

We present a Wizard of Oz evaluation of dual--purpose speech, a technique designed to provide support during a face--to--face conversation by leveraging a user's conversational speech for input. With a dual--purpose speech interaction, the user's speech is meaningful in the context of a human--to--human conversation while providing useful input to a computer. For our experiment, we evaluate the ability to schedule appointments with our calendaring application, the Calendar Navigator Agent. We examine the relative difference between using speech for input compared to traditional pen input on a PDA. We found that speech is more direct and our participants can use their conversational speech for computer input. In doing so, we reduce the manual input needed to operate a PDA while engaged in a calendaring conversation.