Name dialing - How useful is it?

Progress in automatic speech recognition technology has resulted in an increasing amount of deployed applications. Typically, the measure of success has been the amount of deployed or sold units and it has been much more difficult to evaluate the real user benefit from the technology. Actually, the usability, or usefulness, has largely remained an open issue. In this paper we focus on name dialing and discuss its usefulness from different angles, with a strong emphasis on mass market use and inexperienced users. As a concept, name dialing brings us back from where telephony started: an operator assisted way of making calls without a need to remember numbers. In essence, name dialing offers a solution to a minor inconvenience - using the directory. Even the arguably biggest advantage of name dialing, simplified car usage, is still less significant than the various concerns of users. Until time and further technical improvements alleviate the main concerns, usage of name dialing will remain as an occasional, rather than a primary, way of making calls.