Cultural Considerations for the Design of Automotive Speech Applications

摘要

In this paper, we discuss challenges that face designers of speech applications, and in particular automotive speech applications. We describe the ways in which culture is important for the development of speech applications. We build upon existing research on culture and on a technical analysis of speech application components and their attributes. Cultural impact is explored for each of four components of speech applications: speech recognizer, speech synthesizer, text-to-phoneme converter, and dialog manager. Such factors as the variety of possible utterances, sound characteristics, vocabulary, and loaned phonemes are considered. Cultural differences that may impact the dialog manager and interface are discussed with respect to conversation flow strategies, prompts content, prompts language, response time, and error handling. We propose that a first step in the design of automotive speech applications for new markets should involve studying cultural design aspects, even prior to linguistics studies. Although models of cross-cultural differences exist, there is no single model that can directly be applied to automotive speech applications.