Users’ Perceived Difficulties and Corresponding Reformulation Strategies in Google Voice Search

In this article, we report users’ perceptions of query input errors and query reformulation strategies in voice search using data collected through a laboratory user study. Our results reveal that: 1) users’ perceived obstacles during a voice search can be related to speech recognition errors and topic complexity; 2) users naturally develop different strategies to deal with various types of words (e.g., acronyms, single-worded queries, non-English words) with high error rates in speech recognition; and 3) users can have various emotional reactions when encounter voice input errors and they develop preferred usage occasions for voice search.