Experiments with a spoken dialogue system for taking the US census

Abstract This paper reports the results of the development, deployment and testing of a large spoken-language dialogue application for use by the general public. We built an automated spoken questionnaire for the US Bureau of the Census. In the project's first phase, the basic recognizers and dialogue system were developed using 4000 calls. In the second phase, the system was adapted to meet Census Bureau requirements and deployed in the Bureau's 1995 national test of new technologies. In the third phase, we refined the system and showed empirically that an automated spoken questionnaire could successfully collect and recognize census data, and that subjects preferred the spoken system to written questionnaires. Our large data collection effort and two subsequent field tests showed that, when questions are asked correctly, the answers contain information within the desired response categories about 99% of the time.