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<Paper uid="H92-1011">
  <Title>Experiences Collecting Genuine Spoken Enquiries using WOZ Techniques</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2. THE TASK DOMAIN
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The enquiry service was configured around a commercially available route planning software package. The package runs on a PC and contains map and gazetteer information covering the majority of the United Kingdom. Its main feature is its ability to find the shortest and/or quickest routes between two locations in accordance with a range of specifyable variables such as preferences for certain classes of roads and driving speeds.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Alternative routes can also be found.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Clearly the behaviour of the wizard will very much influence the nature of the resulting corpus, and constraints (such as restricting the vocabulary) can be placed on a wizard in a variety of ways \[2\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> However, in order not to restrict or influence callers' behaviour, it was decided that very few restrictions should be placed on the wizard apart from the use of a stock opening phrase and the provision of a few standard reply templates simply in order to reduce the wizard's work load.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In general, the design for the wizard's behaviour was based on information derived from the procedures employed by a commercial company who already provide a route planning service over the telephone (in this case the enquiries being made by tone dialling) based on the same software package.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Every attempt was made to remove all distinctly human characteristics from the wizard's speech such as false starts and stutters, and great care was taken to ensure that breath noise and key clicks were not audible to the caller.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="61" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4. THE EXPERIMENTAL
CONFIGURATION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> As well as implementing a genuine telephone-based enquiry service using WOZ techniques, it was also decided to compare wizard-type transactions with normal human-human interaction for the same task. Hence the experimental set-up was configured to operate with two incoming telephone lines - one assigned to the normal human operator and one assigned to the wizard. Appropriate equipment was installed to provide automatic detection of incoming calls and initiation of recording and digitisation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In order for there to be minimal differences between the operator's behaviour in both the human-human and human-wizard conditions, the same operator was used in each case. As a consequence the only difference between  the two conditions was that the wizard's natural voice was modified using a 'voice disguise' unit. This device changed the talker's pitch and then combined the natural and altered signals to produce a highly synchronised duet effect. It was found that this provided a voice which was unnatural (indeed 'robotic') and yet fully intelligible \[5\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The latter point was considered very important since it was anticipated that the quality of the wizard's voice would affect the user's perception of the system's capabilities; high voice quality being likely to suggest a system of high capabilities while a low voice quality would not only imply a system of poor capabilities but might lead to excessive confirmatory dialogue if the user had difficulty understanding the response \[2\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The service was made available on each line for alternate half day sessions from 10 a.m. to 12 a.m. and 2 p.m.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> to 4 p.m. Whilst one number was on-line the other was connected to an answering machine which requested the caller to try the alternative number.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The table of directions that the route planning software package produces is an essential part of the information service. To overcome the lack of screen display with a telephone-based service it was decided that the printed table could be sent to the caller through the internal mail system (this also served to ensure the identity and location of the caller was known in order to send a questionnaire at a later stage). Callers were also given the option of having the route information read out during the call.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The route planning package was configured to show no particular preference for road type and the road speeds were set at the national speed limits.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="61" end_page="61" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
5. INSTRUCTIONS TO THE
CALLERS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A poster advertising the service was circulated for display on site noticeboards. Also an electronic advertisement was placed in the central computing facility.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Since the emphasis of the exercise was to collect data from genuine enquiries, the advertisments made no mention of either the Speech Research Unit or of the difference between the two available telephone numbers, nor did they specify that the service was experimental, computer-based or automatic in any way.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> On receipt of a call, the operator (in human or wizard mode) always used the following introductory announcement:- &amp;quot;Welcome to the route planning service</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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