LING 270: Homework for Unit 8

Due: Monday April 7

The following problems pertain to interactions with a real speech recognizer. The goal of this exercise is to get a sense of how well systems that are deployed today work.

1. Choose one of the following systems listed below as the basis of your analysis.
   1. Goog411:

      Call 1-800-GOOG-411 and you will be connected to a business directory system from Google. You can say a business name or category, and the system will return with a listing of businesses that match that name and category. You can ask for further details. The system will call the business (free) if you want, or it can send details to your cell phone.

      The system should work for any city within the US or Canada.

      Pick three or more business names or business categories (restaurants, ice cream, pets, ...) and try out the system. What were the categories/names you picked?

      Try another set of names from a different city: you might pick a large city like Chicago (but pick one you know well) where there are a lot of businesses.

   2. Tellme:

      Call 1-800-555-TELL and you will be connected to a speech recognition system powered by TellMe (with technology from Nuance). Perhaps you've already used this before. Let's assume you want to go to the movies, and you want to find out where things are playing. Pick three movie titles now playing in the Urbana-Champaign area and use the 1-800-555-TELL system to find out when and where they are playing. What were the movie titles you picked?

      Pick one of the other categories other than Entertainment/Movies. Once again, describe your interaction.

2. Whichever system you tried, answer the following questions:
   1. How quickly were you able to get the information you wanted?
   2. How many times did the system appear not to understand what you were saying?
   3. If you were misunderstood, were you able to get back on track and find the information you needed?
   4. What do you think the reasons might have been for it misrecognizing what you said?
   5. How would you rate your experience with this system compared to dealing with a live human?
   6. Compared to keying the information in via the letters on the telephone touchpad?
   7. Try to "break" the system. You could try this in a number of ways (the following not being an exhaustive list):
      • Try to effect a foreign accent
      • Speak particularly quickly or slowly
      • Speak in a whisper, or shout
      • Use hypercareful or hypersloppy pronunciation
      • Various combinations of the above.
      Describe what you did and how easy it was to break the system.

   Your discussion should be in the form of a couple of pages of text. Use as much or as little as you need, but in each case I would like to see a fairly thorough analysis of how you felt the technology worked. In particular, if there were problems, what were those problems. Speculate on what might have caused the problems: I am not interested in whether the speculation is correct (in any case, I won't always know) but I want you to be thinking deeply about how this technology works (or doesn't work).