Voice user interfaces

Discussion articles

• Book excerpt: Voice Interaction Design by Randy Allen Harris
  "This is that rare book in Human Computer Interaction we all hope for: the presentation of a practical design process for an emerging important area that is carefully developed out of supporting science. Harris's book offers a competitive edge for designers and a provocative framing of problems for researchers in language."
  (Stuart Card)

• Design differences: VUIs vs GUIs
  Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are a new concept to many who now have the task of doing everything it takes to develop a VoiceXML application. This article describes the difference between the VUI and the long-familiar GUI.

• Design guidelines for interactive voice response systems
  "Given the increasing importance of IVR systems and the role they stand to play as a primary communications channel for businesses to interact with their customers, it is of critical importance to business success that these systems be as easy-to-use as possible."
  (Inovdesigns)

• IVRS forgotten but not gone
  While many companies are starting to understand the value of increasing customer satisfaction over the qeb, it seems that most of them have forgotten about an existing and more widely used channel: the Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS). Everyone has to call up a company over the phone at least once in a while. It very often results in customers getting lost and frustrated, and potentially increases costs to the company as customers find workarounds to speak to a customer service representative or migrate to more expensive channels.

• Press 8 for natural language: the future of IVRs
  A discussion of the pros and cons of "natural language" interactive voice response systems.

• User-centered design for VoiceXML applications
  As a growing audience is exposed to VoiceXML solutions, will people use your applications while they quickly abandon others? Part of the answer to that question depends on how you address human factors issues during application design and development.

• Voice interfaces: assessing the potential
  Visual interfaces are inherently superior to auditory interfaces for many tasks. The Star Trek fantasy of speaking to your computer is not the most fruitful path to usable systems.

• Voice UI info
  Voice recognition technology holds enormous potential: who doesn't like the idea of effortlessly talking to his or her computer? However, as with any technology, the limitations which constrain the user interface are not well understood. In the case of voice recognition, the constraints are very significant. This site presents basic information about the voice user interface design of state-of-the art voice recognition technology.

Research articles

• A comparison of voice-controlled and mouse -controlled web browsing
  Voice controlled web browsers allow users to navigate by speaking the text of a link or an associated number instead of clicking with a mouse. One such browser is Conversa, by Conversational Computing. This study compared voice browsing with traditional mouse-based browsing. It attempted to identify which of three common hypertext forms (linear slide show, grid/tiled map, and hierarchical menu) are well suited to voice navigation, and whether voice navigation is helped by numbering links. The study shows that voice control adds approximately 50% to the performance time for certain types of tasks. Subjective satisfaction measures indicate that for voice browsing, textual links are preferable to numbered links, but the mouse is still easier to use for general purpose web browsing.