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Is Spoken Language All-or-Nothing? Implications for Future Speech-Based Human-Machine Interaction

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Dialogues with Social Robots

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 427))

Abstract

Recent years have seen significant market penetration for voice-based personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri. However, despite this success, user take-up is frustratingly low. This article argues that there is a habitability gap caused by the inevitable mismatch between the capabilities and expectations of human users and the features and benefits provided by contemporary technology. Suggestions are made as to how such problems might be mitigated, but a more worrisome question emerges: “is spoken language all-or-nothing”? The answer, based on contemporary views on the special nature of (spoken) language, is that there may indeed be a fundamental limit to the interaction that can take place between mismatched interlocutors (such as humans and machines). However, it is concluded that interactions between native and non-native speakers, or between adults and children, or even between humans and dogs, might provide critical inspiration for the design of future speech-based human-machine interaction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See [1] for a comprehensive review of the history of speech technology R&D up to, and including, the release of Siri.

  2. 2.

    It is often argued that such an approach is unimportant as users will habituate. However, habituation only occurs after sustained exposure, and a key issue here is how to increase the effectiveness of first encounters (since that has a direct impact on the likelihood of further usage).

  3. 3.

    Interestingly, these ideas do appear to be having some impact on the design of contemporary autonomous social agents such as Jibo (which has a childlike and mildly robotic voice) [28].

  4. 4.

    Members of the same species.

  5. 5.

    Interestingly, Nass and Brave [8] noted that people speak to poor automatic speech recognition systems as if they were non-native listeners.

  6. 6.

    Unfortunately, this term has already been coined to refer to a robot’s natural language abilities in robot-robot and robot-human communication [54].

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Commission [grant numbers EU-FP6-507422, EU-FP6-034434, EU-FP7-231868 and EU-FP7-611971], and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/I013512/1].

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  1. Speech and Hearing Research Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK

    Roger K. Moore

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  1. Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki Institute of Behavioural Sciences, Helsinki, Finland

    Kristiina Jokinen

  2. University of Helsinki , Helsinki, Finland

    Graham Wilcock

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Moore, R.K. (2017). Is Spoken Language All-or-Nothing? Implications for Future Speech-Based Human-Machine Interaction. In: Jokinen, K., Wilcock, G. (eds) Dialogues with Social Robots. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 427. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2585-3_22

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