An Analysis of Dialogue Repair in Virtual Voice Assistants
Matthew Carson Galbraith Mireia Gómez i Martínez
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.