An Analysis of Dialogue Repair in Virtual Voice Assistants

TL;DR

This study investigates how virtual voice assistants like Google Assistant and Siri handle dialogue repair in English and Spanish, revealing differences from human repair strategies and among the assistants and languages.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of dialogue repair strategies used by virtual assistants across two languages, highlighting differences from human interactions.

Findings

Voice assistants differ from humans in repair strategies.

Differences exist among assistants in handling repairs.

Language influences repair response patterns.

Abstract

Language speakers often use what are known as repair initiators to mend fundamental disconnects that occur between them during verbal communication. Previous research in this field has mainly focused on the human-to-human use of repair initiator. We proposed an examination of dialogue repair structure wherein the dialogue initiator is human and the party that initiates or responds to the repair is a virtual assistant. This study examined the use of repair initiators in both English and Spanish with two popular assistants, Google Assistant and Apple's Siri. Our aim was to codify the differences, if any, in responses by voice assistants to dialogues in need of repair as compared to human-human dialogues also in need of repair. Ultimately the data demonstrated that not only were there differences between human-assistant and human-human dialogue repair strategies, but that there were likewise differences among the assistants and the languages studied.