Towards choosing better primes for spoken dialog systems

When humans and computers use the same terms (primes, when they entrain to one another), spoken dialogs proceed more smoothly. The goal of this paper is to describe initial steps we have found that will enable us to eventually automatically choose better primes in spoken dialog system prompts. Two different sets of prompts were used to understand what makes one prime more suitable than another. The impact of the primes chosen in speech recognition was evaluated. In addition, results reveal that users did adopt the new vocabulary introduced in the new system prompts. As a result of this, performance of the system improved, providing clues for the trade off needed when choosing between adequate primes in prompts and speech recognition performance.