Handling of user interruption to achieve timing‐free utterances for spoken dialogue interface

This paper considers the spoken dialogue interface, which is the basic system for the multimodal interface by speech, and discusses the handling of the interruption that ensures the user the timing‐free utterances. In the interruption by the user, if the utterance by the system is designed with the sentence as the unit, as in the conventional system, there will be produced a difference between the designed content of the utterance and the actually uttered content or the content received by the user. From such a viewpoint, the following method is proposed. The unit for the utterance planning is defined as the information to be transmitted by a sentence, and which information is received is always monitored through the management of the turn‐taking between the speakers of the dialogue. As a result of experiment, the handling of smooth interruption is recognized in more than half the subjects. Using the proposed method, the difference between the utterance planned by the system and the utterance received by the user is reduced. It is verified also that the interface is made more convenient by the handling of the interruption. The time required for the user to complete the task is reduced by 7 percent, and the number of positive topic proposals is increased by 21 percent.