The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice

Amtrak: Implicit Confirmation and the "ellipses/and" Question Form

The "ellipses/and" (" and") form of question is a quick and effective way to ask callers a series of two or more related questions. For example, when people want to get a train's status from Amtrak, they first have to indicate if they want arrival or departure information, and then say the departure and arrival train stations . Here's how a typical call goes.

SYSTEM:

Would you like arrival or departure information?

CALLER:

Arrival.

SYSTEM:

What station is the train arriving in?

CALLER:

New York Penn Station.

SYSTEM:

and what's the departure station?

In this example, the system asks for the arrival station first because the caller is seeking arrival information. And since the caller understands that the system also needs to collect the location of the departure station, it's more natural for the system to treat it as a two-part question using the ellipses/and form (" and what's the departure station?") rather than the more formal, parallel question, "What station is the train departing from?"

The ellipses/and form can be used in almost all contexts where the caller is being asked to answer a series of related questions, as in the following two examples.

SYSTEM:

OK, what's the make of the car?

CALLER:

Porsche.

SYSTEM:

and the model?

CALLER:

Nine forty-four.

SYSTEM:

What's the street address?

CALLER:

695 Atlantic Avenue.

SYSTEM:

and the zip code?

CALLER:

02114.

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