DETERMININING PROMPTING SYNTAX AND PARAMETERS FOR LANGUAGE-ORIENTED USER INTERFACES FOR VOICE ACTIVATED SERVICES

A comprehensive system is provided for designing a voice activated user interface (VA UI) having a semantic and syntactic structure adapted to the culture and conventions of spoken language for the intended users. The system decouples the content dimension of speech (semantics) and the manner-of-speaking dimension (syntax) in a systematic way. By decoupling these dimensions, the VA UI can be optimized with respect to each dimension independently and jointly. The approach is general across languages and encompasses universal variables of language and culture. Also provided are voice activated user interfaces. Specifically, a prompting syntax is defined with syntax parameters (such as pace, pause duration, and prompt chunk size) initially determined from samples of dialogue in a conversational language of the target community, and is modified based on dialogue information from its members performing a posed task set by responding to test prompts with semantic and syntactic structures so adapted, as well as a prompting grammar and error handling methods adapted to such user interfaces.