Designing Voice User Interfaces

Chapter 1. Introduction

IN THIS CHAPTER, I discuss a brief history of voice user interfaces (VUIs), and help you determine if your mobile app would benefit from having one. I also cover the term “conversational interfaces,” and provide a short overview of chatbots.

A Brief History of VUIs

In the 1950s, Bell Labs built a system for single-speaker digit recognition. These early systems had tiny vocabularies and weren’t much use outside of the lab. In the 1960s and 1970s, the research continued, expanding the number of words that could be understood and working toward “continuous” speech recognition (not having to pause between every word).

Advances in the 1980s made practical, everyday speech recognition more of a reality, and by the 1990s the first viable, speaker-independent (meaning anyone could talk to it) systems came into being.

The first great era of VUIs were the interactive voice response (IVR) systems, which were capable of understanding human speech over the telephone in order to carry out tasks. In the early 2000s, IVR systems became mainstream. Anyone with a phone could get stock quotes, book plane flights, transfer money between accounts, order prescription refills, find local movie times, and hear traffic information, all using nothing more than a regular landline phone and the human voice.

IVR systems got a bad rap, resulting in Saturday Night Live sketches featuring Amtrak’s virtual travel assistant, “Julie,” and websites like GetHuman (https://gethuman.com/), which is ...