This paper explores durational aspects of pauses, gaps and overlaps in three different conversational corpora with a view to challenge claims about precision timing in turn-taking. Distributions of pause, gap and overlap durations in conversations are presented, and methodological issues regarding the statistical treatment of such distributions are discussed. The results are related to published minimal response times for spoken utterances and thresholds for detection of acoustic silences in speech. It is shown that turn-taking is generally less precise than is often claimed by researchers in the field of conversation analysis or interactional linguistics. These results are discussed in the light of their implications for models of timing in turn-taking, and for interaction control models in speech technology. In particular, it is argued that the proportion of speaker changes that could potentially be triggered by information immediately preceding the speaker change is large enough for reactive interaction controls models to be viable in speech technology.

Speech interfaces are growing in popularity. Through a review of 68 research papers this work maps the trends, themes, findings and methods of empirical research on speech interfaces in HCI. We find that most studies are usability/theory-focused or explore wider system experiences, evaluating Wizard of Oz, prototypes, or developed systems by using self-report questionnaires to measure concepts like usability and user attitudes. A thematic analysis of the research found that speech HCI work focuses on nine key topics: system speech production, modality comparison, user speech production, assistive technology & accessibility, design insight, experiences with interactive voice response (IVR) systems, using speech technology for development, people's experiences with intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) and how user memory affects speech interface interaction. From these insights we identify gaps and challenges in speech research, notably the need to develop theories of speech interface interaction, grow critical mass in this domain, increase design work, and expand research from single to multiple user interaction contexts so as to reflect current use contexts. We also highlight the need to improve measure reliability, validity and consistency, in the wild deployment and reduce barriers to building fully functional speech interfaces for research. Author Keywords Speech interfaces; speech HCI; review; speech technology; voice user interfaces Research Highlights• Most papers focused on usability/theory-based or wider system experience research with a focus on Wizard of Oz and developed systems, though a lack of design work • Questionnaires on usability and user attitudes often used but few were reliable or validated • Thematic analysis showed nine primary research topics • Gaps in research critical mass, speech HCI theories, and multiple user contexts

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This paper investigates prosodic aspects of turn-taking in conversation with aview to improving the efficiency of identifying relevant places at which a machinecan legitimately begin to talk to a human interlocutor. It examines the relationshipbetween interaction control, the communicative function of which is to regulatethe flow of information between interlocutors, and its phonetic manifestation.Specifically, the listener’s perception of such interaction control phenomena ismodelled. Algorithms for automatic online extraction of prosodic phenomenaliable to be relevant for interaction control, such as silent pauses and intonationpatterns, are presented and evaluated in experiments using Swedish map taskdata. We show that the automatically extracted prosodic features can be used toavoid many of the places where current dialogue systems run the risk of interrupt-ingtheir users, as well as to identify suitable places to take the turn.

Rich non-intrusive recording of a naturalistic conversation was conducted in a domestic setting. Four (sometimes five) participants engaged in lively conversation over two 4-hour sessions on two successive days. Conversation was not directed, and ranged widely over topics both trivial and technical. The entire conversation, on both days, was richly recorded using 7 video cameras, 10 audio microphones, and the registration of 3-D head, torso and arm motion using an Optitrack system. To add liveliness to the conversation, several bottles of wine were consumed during the final two hours of recording. The resulting corpus will be of immediate interest to all researchers interested in studying naturalistic, ethologically situated, conversational interaction.