Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice, The

The Language of Asking Questions

At its most basic level, the design of speech-recognition system prompts is composed of two elements:

• Questions the system asks

• Statements the system makes

The questions that are asked need to be clear and not easily misinterpreted, and the statements need to provide useful information, in a valuable format. And most of the time there is a mixture of statements to inform the caller, and questions by which the system will glean new information, in the same context. This can get tricky when the conversations between the computer and the caller start to get complex. Most people don't realize how much error correction they do in real conversations. How often do our conversations with real people sound anything like ...