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Make it clear for callers to know what to say when given an open-ended prompt
It's raining. You've got a vicious deadline clawing at your back, and it has been a long day of intermittent Internet access. Your service cuts in and out in the middle of every email you try to send. The lights on your wireless router flicker impotenuy, and the signal from your one neighbor with a wireless network that doesn't require a password is so weak that you can't get in. You get just enough of a signal to see the network name, BiLLsFAN77, sitting there, taunting you. Your rage is building. You tear the handset off the cradle and start calling your Internet service provider.
Hello, and welcome to the XYZ Corporation's DSL Help Line, a cheery woman, to whom you are ready to read the riot act, greets you.
Your call is very important to us, she bubbles on. In order to be properly serviced, please choose from the following menu.
Oh, brother, a menu.
If you'd like to order service, press 1. If you'd like to upgrade your current service, press 2. If you'd like to check y our bill, press 3. If you'd like to...
Your ISP's system is a nightmare. It's a winding, hierarchical maze of one touch-tone input after another, and whichever option you need seems to be at the tail end of every menu you get kicked into. It takes 20 minutes to reach a live operator, and all the while you're thinking, "There's got to be a better way to navigate this thing."
There is: open-ended prompts.
An open-ended prompt is perhaps easiest to define by what it isn't. The open-ended prompt is very different from the directed dialogue or closed-ended prompt with which many users are most familiar. When users call into an open-ended interface, rather than being provided with a list of several options that they then need to repeat to the computer, open-ended prompts ask more broad -based questions, like Holt? may I help you? slid let users respond in their oviTi words, getting as detailed as they care to.
Open-ended prompts do this by capitalizing on statistically based natural language (NL) technology. The system draws from a...