Repair Mechanism

In conversational interface design, a feature that helps the user and the system recover from misrecognition, ambiguity, or misunderstanding — for example, clarification prompts ("Did you mean the [X] cricket match?"), visible candidate lists, or "try again" affordances that preserve context. Robust repair mechanisms are especially important for users with atypical speech, speech disorders, intellectual disabilities, or cognitive impairment, who experience higher rates of recognition failure in off-the-shelf voice assistants. Good repair shifts the communicative burden away from the user by surfacing the system's uncertainty, rather than silently returning a wrong answer.