But we have to be careful. The single most highly correlated feature with task completion rates is speech recognition accuracy. You might think that’d motivate a garage full of electrical engineers toiling away on accuracy. Well, it does. But what it also motivates is a team of user interface designers toiling away on dialogue strategies to elicit understandable response from users and present data to them in an understandable way. And to develop dialogue strategies to deal with the inevitable errors.

For instance, asking a zip code before an address is a huge help. Zip codes are five digits, which are relatively easy to recognize. Then states, then cities. The state fact-checks the zip, then together restrict the possible cities. The research problem is to just say your address and transcribe it. This problem hasn’t been solved by better speech recognition.

Built-in design also helps. Credit cards have checksums, which can be used to aid recognition. Who knows how many errors this has saved, and not just from speech reco.