Dealing with ‘long turns’ produced by users of an assistive system: How missing uptake and recipiency lead to turn increments

Based on a user study, we start from the observation that `long turns' uttered by users towards an assistive system constitute a challenge for the dialog management of a voice-operated system. Assuming an interactional perspective, we address the question as to how `long turns' emerge in interaction. We suggest to conceive of these utterances as being co-constructed by both, the user and the multimodal conduct of the technical system. In this paper, we examine how such `long turns' emerge step by step in terms of an initial utterance being expanded by so-called `increments' as well as their specific structure. Analysis shows that such utterance expansions (causing `long turns') indicate that the user faces problems with a lack of uptake resp. display of recipiency by the technical system. Combining qualitative micro-analysis with quantification, we discuss specific interactional contexts of turn increments, different actions performed by them and the role of uptake resources in the light of designing autonomous speech-based systems.