‘The Sound of Silence’: A Preliminary Experiment Investigating Non-Verbal Auditory Representations in Telephone-Based Automated Spoken Dialogues

This paper describes an exploratory experiment investigating access to non-seen diagrams with a view to presenting such diagrams through an auditory interface. Sighted individuals asked questions of a human experimenter about diagrams they could not see, in order to learn about them. The dialogue was recorded and analysed. The analysis resulted in an insight into the strategies used by the participants and a handle on the information requirements of the participants. Results showed that participants could understand and internalise the simpler diagrams, though not with complete success, but faltered on the more complex diagram. Several strategies and points for further investigation emerged.