Conversational help desk: Vague callers and context switch

Two salient properties of user behavior make Help Desk a unique speech application different from the more general transactional kind: (a) majority of users have only vague ideas about their problem, and (b) these users are likely to context-switch (change discourse topic) during the course of a dialog. We describe a conversational Help Desk natural language call routing application and show how the alignment of Voice User Interface (VUI), Grammar Development, and Application Architecture results in a conversational user interface that is able to guide the vague user in the most optimal way while being flexible to allow mid-discourse context switches. Usability evaluation confirms the peculiar user behavior and provides empirical evidence that user's perception of time in a speech application can be influenced by the dialog; in this case, Help Desk users' tend not to become impatient going through three-five dialog turns, as long as dialog is progressing toward problem-resolution.