Spoken Interaction with Broadcast Debates

The constant emergence and change of technologies in the form of digital products and services can cause certain groups of the population to feel excluded, older adults represent one such group. We investigate how to combine applied research on computational models of argument and human-centric computing to impact the way in which older adults interact with broadcast debates. This paper describes a technology application that uses a speech recognition interface to interact with broadcast debates. The application classifies spoken utterances and creates positive or negative “votes” related arguments from a debate. We describe a user study where older adults interact with a debate using the application. Our results indicate that the use of speech recognition, extra information provided to users, and feedback on their interaction, plays an important role in their engagement with the debate.