17. The at least one computer-readable storage medium of claim 15 , wherein the at least one measure of confusability is customized to a playback system to resolve acoustically confusable items specific to the playback system.
15. At least one non-transitory computer-readable storage medium encoded with a plurality of machine-readable instructions that, when executed by a computer perform a method comprising: processing input speech to determine if clarification of the input speech is desired because the spoken dialog system has returned at least two speech recognition hypotheses having similar confidence values for at least a portion of the input speech; retrieving, if clarification is desired, a first list of items to be played back to the user; identifying acoustically confusable items on the first list of items using at least one measure of confusability; selecting, based, at least in part, on at least one rule in a collection of rules, a disambiguation strategy from a plurality of disambiguation strategies, wherein the disambiguation strategy is selected based on a type of acoustic confusion between the acoustically confusable items on the first list of items, wherein the plurality of disambiguation strategies includes a first disambiguation strategy comprising spelling at least a portion of each of at least two of the items in the first list of items and a second disambiguation strategy comprising repeating at least two of the items in the first list of items and identifying a first letter of a word in each of the at least two of the items; generating a disambiguated list of items by modifying at least one of the acoustically confusable items on the first list according to the disambiguation strategy; and playing a prompt comprising the disambiguated list of items back to the user.