Spoken Interaction within the Computed World: Evaluation of a Multitasking Adaptive Spoken Dialogue System

Within the framework of the EU-funded Project ATRACO we have implemented the adaptive Spoken Dialogue Manager Owl Speak. Its most important feature is the ability to pause, resume, and to switch between multiple interactive tasks. These features make the deployed Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) capable of multitasking. In this paper we investigate the effects of multitasking on users within the context of spoken dialogues. Especially within Intelligent Environments such as ATRACO, it is necessary to modify the status of the SDS depending on the actual context and of the requirements the user may have. We have conducted an evaluation to investigate how users cope with the multitasking capabilities of an SDS. The results are two-fold: on the one hand, users who were engaged in multitasking dialogues were more inclined to interact with the SDS. On the other hand, the subjects who serially received one task after another were able to retain more facts in mind than the subjects who used the dynamic multitasking approach. By taking these results into account we conclude the paper with some future work.