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

Amtrak: Implicit Confirmation and the “ellipses/and” Question Form

The “ellipses/and” (“… and”) form of question is a quick and effective way to ask callers a series of two or more related questions. For example, when people want to get a train's status from Amtrak, they first have to indicate if they want arrival or departure information, and then say the departure and arrival train stations. Here's how a typical call goes.

SYSTEM:	Would you like arrival or departure information?
CALLER:	Arrival.
SYSTEM:	What station is the train arriving in?
CALLER:	New York Penn Station.
SYSTEM:	… and what's the departure station?

In this example, the system asks for the arrival station first because the caller is seeking arrival information. And since the caller understands ...