Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

The Verbal Communication Process

Communication is a process that involves a message, sender, receiver, and channel. The message is the information being transmitted. In verbal communication between people, the words used to convey the message are actually only a part of what is eventually understood. Nonverbal communication such as body language between humans actually carries a large part of the message. However, in human-computer interaction using speech user interfaces, we have certain constraints and can only work with the verbal aspects of communication. Although computers sometimes make us smile and sometimes make us frown, they cannot yet interpret any meaning from our body language or other nonverbal communication. The sender is the person sending the message. The receiver is the person who receives the message. In the case of human-computer interaction the sender or receiver may be a computer. The medium used to transfer the message is called the channel. Channels can include the telephone, the written page, a face-to-face meeting, or even a computer.

The goal of communication is to achieve a shared understanding of the message, meaning that both the sender and receiver understand the message in exactly the same way.

The goal of communication is to achieve a shared understanding of the message, meaning that both the sender and receiver understand the message in exactly the same way.

The communication process has six stages: conception, encoding, transmission, reception, ...