Are You Listening to Your Spanish Speakers? How Spanish Speakers in the U.S. Say U.S. Addresses

Abstract

This work presents research analyzing the structure of how U.S. addresses are spoken by Spanish speakers living in the U.S. The findings, based on live-call recordings of Spanish speakers interacting with call center agents, reveal that an English-like format with the street number spoken before the street name was used in 91% of the cases, even though the street number was said in Spanish 100% of the time. How audio prompt wording can be used to influence the way addresses are spoken and also how street names consisting of numbers are said are possible areas for future study. In addition, some best practices related to dialog design for bilingual Spanish-English speech recognition applications are also revealed during this study.