Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

Information Devices

“Nowadays, a computer screen can be anything, from a drive-in screen to a wrist watch.”

Tim Berners-Lee, credited as inventor of the World Wide Web

In addition to using speech synthesis, speech recognition, and telephony with PCs, these technologies are being used in other information devices and appliances such as personal digital assistants, auto navigation systems, telephone answering machines, and other consumer and industrial electronics products. The following are examples of “cutting edge” information devices that employ speech technology:

• NeoPoint is a wireless digital mobile phone and personal digital assistant. In addition to the digital phone features, it has an address book, calendar, Web browser, alarm clock, and pager. It can dock with a PC and interacts with speech commands.
• The Speech Interface Group at MIT Media Laboratory has developed Nomadic Radio, a “wearable” audio messaging system. While that may sound like an ordinary pager, its actually more than that. The system uses a neckset casing by Nortel to house a Libretto 100 mini-portable PC driven by a pure auditory interface. Using wireless telephony, users can check e-mail, voicemail, and news broadcasts, and interact with their address book and to-do lists.
• A Florida company called Computer Voice Technology, Inc. sells a speaker-independent, natural language system called Hal2000 that lets users control most home electronic systems via speech commands through a telephone or microphone ...