In My Experience... | Vocal UI's won't catch on in the mass market. (1617)

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Vocal UI's won't catch on in the mass market.
[ Posted by Dan on May 24, 2002 | 4 Comments ]

Or at least, I hope they won't. The simple reason being that I work in an environment where there are scores of other people using computers (read: cube farm). If even 10% of them were issuing commands to their machines by speaking, the noise would be absolutely and unbearably annoying. But, the 800 pound gorilla has been talking about a bright new future of voice recognition systems. As reported by C|net...

Although speech recognition has been around for years and has seen limited adoption, Microsoft is betting that more powerful hardware and software means that the technology is ready to become a part of Web sites and business systems.

Now, the part of 'web sites and business systems' is pure crap (imho) due to the reason mentioned above. But there are a few targeted applications of this tech that I think would be extremely useful. First, for those who only have their voices, this sort of tech is essential. Second, for geeks like myself that play squad-level online games (like Tribes2) communicating via voice is an exponential leap over text based communication. But there's a diff between issuing commands to a voice recognizing computing system and another dork playing Tribes2. But Microsoft knows that. Again, as reported by c|Net...

Software maker Fonix announced it signed an agreement with Microsoft to provide speech recognition software for its Xbox game console. Microsoft later this year will begin selling the Communicator, a headset microphone that will plug into the Xbox and allow online players to communicate with one another and control games using voice commands.

So, what's the deal? Is the Communicator for 'person to person' and 'person to computer' voice communication? And if it's both, what does that mean for vocal HCI?

Disclaimer: I own an Xbox, use Mac OSX as my main OS and work for AOL. So spend my two cents here how ever you want.

It turns out that speech UI is not only noisy, but it can distract yourself:

At http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56499-2002May8.html

Shneiderman says researchers in his computer science lab discovered through controlled experiments that when you tell your computer to "page down" or "italicize that word" by speaking aloud, you're gobbling up precious chunks of memory -- leaving you with little brainpower to focus on the task at hand. It's easier to type or click a mouse while thinking about something else because hand-eye coordination uses a different part of the brain, the researchers concluded.

-Posted by Peter Kovacs on May 24, 2002 02:23 PM

Another example is how ridiculous I would feel if my wife caught me giving voice commands in the new Star Trek game that has voice recog built in. Seriously, if she heard "load photon torpedos!" coming from my office, she'd think I was a bigger dork than I already am.

-Posted by Dan on May 24, 2002 03:24 PM

Tribes 2 is fun but I always feel like a 12 year old when I use the voice features. I stick to the basics VGS, VGQ, VDD, VGCS

VGB

-Posted by Mont on May 27, 2002 09:30 PM

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/it-nielsen1/

Dr. Jakob Nielsen
May 2001

No. Voice interfaces will not replace screens as the medium of choice for most user interfaces.

-Posted by dan on August 17, 2002 12:05 AM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).