Robustness in Speech Based Interfaces:

Sharing the Tricks of the Trade
A CHI 2002 Workshop

Sunday April 21

Workshop Structure

Participant presentations – each participant will be asked to present his or her favorite trick/s for increasing robustness in the user interaction of a speech-based system. Ideally the participant will have one or more success stories to share as well as one or more failure stories. These will be followed by short comments by other selected participants.
Group examination and discussion – a facilitated discussion will ensue to examine the various techniques presented and attempt to find common threads as well as define circumstances for success.
Summarization of techniques
Discussion and summarization of suggested dimensions of speech-based systems and user situations
Wrap up – the concluding activities for the workshop will be the creation of poster and a definition of follow-on activities (e.g. publications).

Method of Interaction

Initially, we will ask each participant to briefly describe his or her proposed techniques along with the experience with it. The focus here will be on understanding what the techniques are and the context for applying the particular technique.

After each presentation, the group will react to the technique and success/failure story presented. The commentators will give their thoughts (only a couple of minutes long). Others will then share their experience with the technique as well as their particular circumstances of the usage. If none have previous experience with the technique, there will be a discussion of the potential strengths of the proposal and its applicability to a variety of circumstances. Interlacing each ten-minute presentation with questions and group discussion will ensure that the format of the workshop will remain interactive.

At the end of the formal presentations, the organizers will facilitate a group discussion as to what the common threads are in the techniques tried and how these relate to the dimensions of the particular speech interface on which it was tried. We will then summarize the group's proposed techniques. We will also allow time for a general discussion of how to evaluate our output and how to continue the work in a distributed fashion.

Schedule for the Workshop

Morning: Preliminary introductions; agenda; presentations by participants (about 10 minutes each); group reaction and commentary to each technique presented.

Afternoon: Facilitated discussion of common threads in proposed techniques. Definition of dimensions for classes of speech-based interfaces and applicability of the various techniques for each dimension. Synthesis by group of findings into poster. Discussion of ways to publish the results from the workshop

Pre-workshop Activities

We would require participants to read all the position papers and be prepared to discuss their experience (if any) with the "trick" proposed in the position paper of others workshop participants. If the participant does not have any experience in the particular technique presented, then thought should be given as to its applicability to a wide range of systems.

We will set up a website for the workshop to facilitate the distribution of the position papers as well as pre-workshop discussions and interactions. Through these discussions we will select a small number of commentators that will prepare comments or questions to the position papers.

Dissemination of the Results

We will create a poster for the CHI conference.

Given that the workshop will focus on topics that usually are difficult topics for traditional journal and conference papers, selecting the contributions from the workshop for a journal special issue might not be the best idea for distributing the lessons learned to a wider audience. However, one of our goals is to summarize the workshop in one or more papers related to the two central themes of the workshop. The exact format for this will be discussed at the workshop, and possibly in post-workshop email discussions. In addition to these publications, we will prepare a report for publication in the SIGCHI Bulletin.