- Leah Nicolich-Henkin, C. Rosé, A. Black. 2016. Initiations and Interruptions in a Spoken Dialog System. Abstract: Choosing an appropriate way for a spoken dialog system to initiate a conversation is a challenging problem, and, if done incorrectly, can negatively affect people’s performance on other important tasks. We describe the results of a study in which participants play a game and are inter-rupted by spoken notiﬁcations in different styles. We compare people’s perceptions of the notiﬁcation styles, as well as their effect on task performance. The different notiﬁcations include manipulations of pre-notiﬁcations and information about the urgency of the task. We ﬁnd that pre-notiﬁcations help people respond signiﬁ-cantly faster to urgent tasks, and that 43% of people, more than in any other category, prefer a notiﬁcation style in which the no-tiﬁcation begins by stating the urgency of the task.
