Dealing with Long Utterances: How to Interrupt the User in a Socially Acceptable Manner?

Based on two contrasting case analyses we describe practices of handling long utterances, i.e. turn increments produced by users. The strategies to handle long utterances are executed by a human wizard in the context of a speech-based assistive system and reveal specific characteristics of human-human-interaction like precise timing that are not easily implemented into a technical system. The preliminary analysis shows two basic strategies of handling long utterances:1) to interrupt and 2) to wait-and-see. But the fine-grained analysis of the participants' perspective shows yet another dimension when evaluating forms of handling turn increments:depending on whether user input was taken up and so, the initiated action is continued, even interruptions (at uncommon points in interaction) are socially accepted by users. In contrast, the socially 'safe' strategy to wait-and-see might even cause trouble, when the jointly worked on task is not continued by the system.