Adaptation of users' spoken dialogue patterns in a conversational interface

The design of robust new interfaces that process conversational speech is a challenging research direction largely because users' spoken language is so variable, which is especially true of children. The present research explored whether children's response latencies before initiating a conversational turn converge with those heard in the text-to-speech (TTS) of a computer partner. A study was conducted in which twenty-four 7-to-10-year-old children conversed with animated characters that responded with different types of TTS voices during an educational software application. Analyses confirmed that, while interacting with opposite TTS voices, children's average response latencies adapted 18.4% in the direction of their computer partner's speech. These adaptations were dynamic, bi-directional, and generalized across different types of users and TTS voices. The long-term goal of this research is the predictive modeling of human-computer communication patterns to guide the design of well synchronized, robust, and adaptive conversational interfaces.