From Writing Dialogue to Designing Conversation: Considering the potential of Conversation Analysis for Voice User Interfaces

Conversation design at least partly aspires to create Voice User Interfaces which emulate human speech production. And yet, there is no established approach for the development of naturalistic conversational infrastructure for VUIs; conversation designers are advised to work from their common sense understanding of conversation, producing written scripts, based on memory and imagination, which are later converted into speech. This is a shortcoming in conversation design which needs to be addressed. In this provocation paper, we argue that the starting point in the development of any VUI should be the examination of natural spoken conversation, preferably from the same interactional context in which the VUI will be deployed. We provide a short example to illustrate how the current process of conversation scriptwriting can be a barrier to this, and demonstrate how this can be overcome using the social scientific approach of Conversation Analysis (CA).