Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

Book Focus

In our research of books and articles on speech interfaces we were struck by two aspects of the literature. The first was the lack of information about speech interfaces overall. Second, the literature that does exist is technical in nature and assumes a thorough familiarity with speech technology. What happens, we wondered, when a practitioner in software and interface design needs to work on a speech interface, but is new to the field? This is the point of view we adopted in this book.

We focus primarily on the AUI and S/GUI aspects of the interface, not the underlying programming techniques. Our bias is toward a usability point of view. We cover the basics of speech technology that an interface designer needs to understand in order to construct a usable interface, for instance, the basics of sound and language. We discuss guidelines for effective communication, prompting, wording, and error handling to ensure that the interface is easy to learn and use. We do not discuss writing code for speech recognizers.