EXPERIMENTS WITH A SPOKEN DIALOGUE SYSTEM FOR TAKING THE US CENSUS

This paper reports the results of the development, deployment and test ing of a large spoken-language dialogue application for use by the gen eral public. We built an automated spoken questionnaire for the US Bur eau of the Census. In the project's first phase, the basic recognizers and dialogue system were developed using 4000 calls. In the second ph ase, the system was adapted to meet Census Bureau requirements and dep loyed in the Bureau's 1995 national test of new technologies. In the t hird phase, we refined the system and showed empirically that an autom ated spoken questionnaire could successfully collect and recognize cen sus data, and that subjects preferred the spoken system to written que stionnaires. Our large data collection effort and two subsequent field tests showed that, when questions are asked correctly, the answers co ntain information within the desired response categories about 99% of the time.