The utility of spoken dialog systems

The commercial successes of spoken dialog systems in the developed world provide encouragement for their use in the developing world, where speech could play a role in the dissemination of relevant information in local languages. We investigate the evolution of spoken dialog system research in the developed world, and show that the utility of speech is based on user factors and application factors (amongst others). After adjusting the factors for the developing world context and plotting their interactions, we offer several predictions for the field. In particular, we show that the field of spoken dialog system for the developing world is in a nascent stage and will likely take another decade to have an impact similar to that in the developed world.