9 Hi Akua. I’m Asa, your virtual receptionist. Happy to confirm your Screening appointment is now 10 booked for Fri 18 Mar ’22 at 13:00. Is this ok?
Example 4 starts with the user making a choice about their desired appointment time. This is embedded in a longer, conventionally indirect request which includes negative politeness markers (‘I would like’). After the bot’s repair initiation with a false negative response that includes prompts (l. 2), the user accommodates to one of these prompts (l. 4). This leads to progression and allows the bot to offer the time-of-day selection menu (l. 4-5) and subsequently results in successful appointment booking (l. 6-10).
Success factors for repair
The four examples discussed so far have provided a first insight into the range of repair strategies deployed by users. However, they have, at this stage, not provided a clear picture as to which strategies are most likely to be successful. For example, ‘accommodation’ can be a successful strategy for negotiating one’s way through a sequence of misunderstanding (example 4, example 2), but is not necessarily universally so (example 3).
To understand more about the success factors for working through misunderstanding, we cross-referenced users’ strategy choices with the bot’s subsequent responses. Table 4 shows the success ration of users’ repair strategies, with ‘success’ being defined as a repair being responded to with a relevant response as opposed to a false negative, false positive or no response.