Design and evaluation of automated telephone services

Describes work carried out as part of a five year research project to investigate the design, implementation and evaluation of dialogues for automated telephone services. The project involves a series of large-scale field experiments using a new Wizard of Oz (WOZ) scheme for the investigation of users´ attitudes towards simulated automated telephone services and the evaluation of the perceived usability of such services. The project is distinguished from most previous studies by the choice of highly constrained application domains; by the the degree of control the WOZ software provides over the experimental variables; by the care being taken to quantitatively measure users´ attitudes and perceived usability; and by the large subject samples used in the experiments. The experimental programme itself consists of a series of WOZ experiments in which the characteristics of the speech interface (including the speech recogniser) are manipulated and the dependent variables of user attitude and perceived usability are measured by both a telephone questionnaire and a postal questionnaire