Currently there are no dialog systems that enable purely voice-based access to the unstructured information on websites such as Wikipedia. Such systems could be revolutionary for non-literate users in the developing world. To investigate interface issues in such a system, we developed VoicePedia, a telephone-based dialog system for searching and browsing Wikipedia. In this paper, we present the system, as well as a user study comparing the use of VoicePedia to SmartPedia, a Smartphone GUI-based alternative. Keyword entry through the voice interface was significantly faster, while search result navigation, and page browsing were significantly slower. Although users preferred the GUI-based interface, task success rates between both systems were comparable - a promising result for regions where Smartphones and data plans are not viable.
Cite as: Sherwani, J., Yu, D., Paek, T., Czerwinski, M., Ju, Y.-C., Acero, A. (2007) Voicepedia: towards speech-based access to unstructured information. Proc. Interspeech 2007, 146-149, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2007-60
@inproceedings{sherwani07_interspeech,
author={J. Sherwani and Dong Yu and Tim Paek and Mary Czerwinski and Yun-Cheng Ju and Alex Acero},
title={{Voicepedia: towards speech-based access to unstructured information}},
year=2007,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2007},
pages={146--149},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2007-60}
}