Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

Interview with John Karat

Research Staff member

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University

Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from University of Colorado

John Karat is a senior research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He has an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Colorado. In this interview John talks about his research at IBM on speech technology.

Tell me about your background.

I started with IBM with a group in Austin, Texas, that was developing our common user access guidelines and was with that project until it moved to Boca Raton, Florida. Then I went to the research division.

Tell me what areas of speech interfaces you have been specializing in.

I'll tell you how I came into working with speech interfaces. It wasn't something that I've always or continuously done in my career. I became interested in the design of interactive systems, and what I, as a behavioral scientist, could contribute to making technology work better for people. Working for a technology company there are a whole lot of folks running around doing research in making better technology, but they're not necessarily focused on the use of that technology.

When I first came to the research division we had the User Interface Institute, which ...