A Reusable System for Wizard of Oz Deployment Improving Time to Market and System Performance with Wizard Oversight

摘要

Many call center applications are migrating to natural language understanding as a means to improve the caller experience, flattening complex menu hierarchies and creating a more natural dialogue that allows the caller to express their needs in their own words. One of the greatest challenges in bringing a new natural language system online is where to get the data used in the statistical models that drive the system's decision making. One means of gathering this is via a Wizard of Oz (WOZ) system in which callers believe they are interacting with a computer however behind the proverbial curtain a human agent is driving the call. Unfortunately, setting up a Wizard of Oz for anything beyond a trivial application can be very time consuming. This paper describes a system for inserting a wizard into the flow of live calls in a call center, allowing the wizard to provide real-time input to the voice application. This reusable Wizard of Oz (RWOZ) system dramatically cuts deployment time for new applications, allows for quick deployment throughout the enterprise and across verticals, and frees the voice application developer from the constraints of interacting with a wizard.