Humans, Computers and Wizards: Human (Simulated) Computer Interaction

Computers are increasingly able to mimic abilities we often think of as exclusively human.Humans, Computers and Wizardsconsiders current perspectives on human-computer interaction and argues for the value of an approach taken from sociology which is based on conversation analysis. Using data taken from a major, European Union funded project on speech understanding, the SunDial project, this book shows how this data may be analyzed to yield important conclusions about the organisation of both human-human and human-computer information dialogues. It describes the Wizard-of-Oz method of collecting speech dialogues from people who believe they are interacting with a speech understanding system before that system has been fully designed or built and it shows how the resulting dialogues may be analyzed to guide further design. This book provides detailed and comparative empirical studies of human and human-computer speech dialogues.