Acoustic Features for Profiling Mobile Users of Conversational Interfaces

Conversational interfaces allow human users to use spoken language to interact with computer-based information services. In this paper we examine the potential for personalizing speech-based human-computer interaction according to the user’s gender and age. We describe a system that uses acoustic features of the user’s speech to automatically estimate these physical characteristics. We discuss the difficulties of implementing this process in relation to the high level of environmental noise that is typical of mobile human-computer interaction.