Chris Schmandt

Abstract

Human listeners use voice back channels to indicate their comprehension of a talker's remarks. This paper describes an attempt to build a user interface capable of employing these back channel responses for flow control purposes while presenting a variety of audio information to a listener. Acoustic evidence based on duration and prosody (rhythm and melody) of listeners' utterances is employed as a means of discriminating responses by discourse function without using word recognition. Such an interface has been applied to three tasks: speech synthesis of driving directions, speech synthesis of electronic mail, and retrieval of recorded voice messages.