Elements of interactivity in telephone conversations

The term “interactivity” has been defined in numerous ways in the context of communications, but a definition of interactivity as an instrumentally measurable parameter of conversations is still missing. In this paper, we approach this issue by applying a parametric analysis to telephone conversations recorded during speech quality tests. To this end, we extract the basic conversational parameters like speech activity, mutual silence and double talk as well as a set of conversation events like speaker alternation rate and interruption rate. Comparing two types of scenarios for conversational speech quality assessment and exploring four different situations with regard to transmission delay, we aim at understanding the interdependencies between the conversational parameters which are basic for studying interactivity. This is intended to, ultimately, lead to an instrumental metric distilled from the relevant parameters.