Chapter 11. Planning Prosody


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The number you have dialed, Four? Four? Four? Four? Four? Four? Four? Is not in service. Please check the listing and dial again. <click!>


Biased by the immutability of the printed word, most people think a "four" is a "four" is a "four." Actually, the digit's context in the string and the string's context in the larger utterance make a big difference in how this word is spoken. Printed representations such as "four" and "4" do not do justice to the richly textured system of spoken language, which is, of course, the essence of voice user interfaces. In fact, there are many ways to say the word "four," depending on context. This is prosody.

Chapter 10 argues that VUIs should exploit the communication system that users are most familiar with. To this end, we look at natural (human-to-human), everyday spoken language and distill certain features and principles that can be applied to VUI prompting. The focus of that chapter, however, is wording what to say, what words to use, and how to arrange them in a prompt. In this chapter we look at how the naturalistic prompts we write should actually sound in context. In technical terms, what is their ideal prosodic structure? For a given recording, what prosody will be the most familiar, the most comfortable, and the most comprehensible to users? What prosody will enhance users' perception of the interface and the persona that fronts it? Just as context plays an essential role in determining the form of prompts, context is also of utmost importance in the prosody of prompts.

The following is a high-level outline of the rest of this chapter:

  • What is prosody?

  • Functions of prosody

  • Stress

  • Intonation

  • Concatenating phone numbers

  • Minimizing concatenation splices

  • Pauses

  • TTS guidelines



Voice User Interface Design 2004
Voice User Interface Design 2004
ISBN: 321185765
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 117

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