LET'S GO: Improving Spoken Dialog Systems for the Elderly and Non-natives

Antoine Raux
Brian Langner
Alan W Black
Maxine Eskenazi
Language Technologies Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
{antoine,blangner,awb,max}@cs.cmu.edu

Abstract:

With the recent improvements in speech technology, it is now possible to build spoken dialog systems that basically work. However, such systems are designed and tailored for the general population. When users come from less general sections of the population, such as the elderly and non-native speakers of English, the accuracy of dialog systems degrades.

This paper describes Let's Go, a dialog system specifically designed to allow dialog experiments to be carried out on the elderly and non-native speakers in order to better tune such systems for these important populations. Let's Go is designed to provide Pittsburgh area bus information. The basic system is described and our initial experiments are outlined.