NameSpec asks: What's Your Name in Chinese? A Voice Bot to Specify Chinese Personal Names through Dialog

Abstract

We present NameSpec, a voice interface that specifies Mandarin Chinese personal names with the user through dialog. Chinese personal names can contain thousands of different, sometimes rare, characters, many of which are homophones that require further disambiguation. Integrated in larger CUI ecosystems as a bot skill, Namespec is activated endogenously when the need arises to input personal names as part of e.g. ticket booking systems or financial services. The results of a preliminary user experience evaluation trail (n=100) show that NameSpec currently completes around 82% of user queries successfully, but challenges remain related to unseen user input, tone recognition and Pinyin-character mapping.