Empirical Studies of Everyday Professional, Domestic and Client-Service Communication for the Development of Voice Assistants in Russian

Voice assistants are gradually becoming an increasingly common feature of our everyday life. However, the naturalness of communication provided by them usually leaves much to be desired. It may be caused by the fact that many chat-bots are trained on artificially created linguistic data sets and on...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tatiana Sherstinova, Irina Petrova, Olga Mineeva, Maria Fedosova
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: FRUCT 2022-11-01
Series:Proceedings of the XXth Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.fruct.org/publications/volume-32/fruct32/files/She.pdf
Description
Summary:Voice assistants are gradually becoming an increasingly common feature of our everyday life. However, the naturalness of communication provided by them usually leaves much to be desired. It may be caused by the fact that many chat-bots are trained on artificially created linguistic data sets and on fictional dialogues modeled by linguists on the basis of common phrasebooks or communication textbooks. As a result, the necessary pragmatic result can be achieved, but the feeling of unnatural communication of a voice assistant remains, which often reveals itself by the use of archaic phrases or remarks that are not quite suitable for the situation. It seems that the situation can to be improved by referring to real speech data namely, to a representative volume of sound recordings of real speech communication. The paper discusses some approaches to the analysis of speech data from the sound corpus ""One Day of Speech"", which is the most representative resource of Russian everyday spoken communication. The pragmatic structure of professional and everyday conversations is considered, as well as the linguistic content of standard modules, such as Greeting and Farewell. As a practical recommendation, we can suggest increasing the variability of answers not due to the lexical diversity of phrases, but due to a more diverse intonation implementation for the most typical replicas of spoken Russian.
ISSN:2305-7254
2343-0737