Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

Interview with Sharon Oviatt

Co-Director, Center for Human-Computer Communication

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology

Sharon Oviatt is co-director of the Center for Human-Computer Communication (CHCC) in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology Dr. Oviatt has a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Toronto (1979), an M.A. from the University of Toronto (1974), and a B.A. (with highest honors) from Oberlin College (1972).

Oviatt has researched many of the detail decisions we make on speech interfaces. Her discussion about these decisions, the guidelines, and their implications is presented in the following interview.

Tell me how you got into the speech area.

I've been doing speech and language-oriented work for the last 20 years, but my interest in it has shifted. I started out doing research on human memory and cognition, and infant speech perception. I did a degree at the University of Toronto in the Psychology Department developing a signal detection method for measuring infant language comprehension before they were actually speaking. It wasn't until the late '80s that I switched to the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI and started working on computationally-oriented issues. After working at SRI for about seven years, I moved ...