Speech interaction for older adults

Abstract

Interaction with electronic speech products is becoming a fact of life through telephone answering systems and speech-driven booking systems, and is set to increase in the future. Older adults will be obliged to use more of these electronic products, and because of their special interactional needs due to age-related impairments it is important that such interactions are designed to suit the needs of such users, and in particular, that appropriate mechanisms are put in place to support learning of older users about interaction. Drawing upon the expertise of tutors at Age Concern Oxfordshire, and the results of preliminary investigations with older adults using dialogues in a speech system, this paper explores the conditions which best provide for the learning experience of older adults, and looks at special features which enable instructions and help for learning to be embedded within speech dialogue design.

The MATCH corpus: a corpus of older and younger users’ interactions with spoken dialogue systems

“…In end-to-end evaluations, the main problems were inadequate ASR and unsatisfactory strategies for recovering from errors (Dulude 2002;Zajicek et al 2004;Black et al 2005a). This is in line with findings from deployed research systems such as the Pittsburgh bus information system ''Let's Go'' (Raux et al 2006).…”

“…Sharit et al 2003;Zajicek et al 2004), there is a dearth of fully annotated corpora of interactions between older people and SDS. State-of-the-art statistical approaches to dialogue management (Levin et al 2000;Young 2000; Lemon and Pietquin 2007) rely on having adequate training data, typically requiring on the order of thousands of dialogues to achieve good performance.…”

Senior users of the internet: lessons from the cybernun study

“…Increasing skill levels help senior users recognize and avoid cyberspace dangers, and diminish their concerns about mastery of hardware and software [5,10,33,35].…”

Making it easier for older people to talk to smart homes: the effect of early help prompts

“…But when should help be given? Most previous studies assumed that help should only be given when it is needed [11,34,82,83]. However, this means that users will only receive help if they ask for it or if a problem is detected.…”