Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

Chapter 10

Speech Guidelines

“We think in generalities, but we live in details.”

Alfred North Whitehead

In the previous chapter on the laws of interface design, we covered the basic principles of interface design. This chapter applies those laws and provides specific guidelines to follow when designing the interface for a speech application. The guidelines are organized into the following categories:

Errors;

Feedback;

Confirmations;

User expectations;

Keypads and motor actions;

Social and environmental issues;

Command-and-control;

Continuous speech recognition;

Conversation and prompting;

Menus;

Non-speech audio/auditory icons.