An experimental evaluation of preferences for data entry method in automated telephone services

Abstract

This paper reports an experiment to investigate users' preferences amongst three modes of data entry in an automated home shopping service: DTMF input on the telephone keypad, and isolated word (IW) and connected word (CW) speech input. Preferences were measured both by means of attitude questionnaires and by giving participants an explicit choice among the three versions of the service once they had experienced them all. Users' attitudes to the service with a given mode of data entry were found to vary according to their cognitive skills (verbal and spatial abilities) and according to whether they had previously experienced a different data entry mode. Overall, DTMF and CW were rated similarly, and were strongly preferred to IW. Implications of these findings for the implementation of telephone-based services are discussed.