Designing with Sound

Chapter 6. Designing Voice Interfaces

VOICE INTERFACES ARE A huge and booming area of development. Consumers have more options than ever before, from Amazon Alexa and Google Home to Siri and Cortana. Voice interfaces are found in vehicles, appliances, and televisions, and in third-party partnerships with restaurant booking systems, maps, and home-speaker systems.

Vocal Persona

Designing a vocal persona is as important as designing the response model for the voice interface. Voice interfaces can borrow lessons on timing, personality, and character from theater, improv, and comedy. Studying improvisation can help with building conversation-based interactions, such as the “yes and” rule of improv theater. Start by describing the attributes you would like your vocal persona to convey, and work through exercises from different disciplines for inspiration.

Our expectations for voice interfaces have been heavily influenced by the television and film industry. TV shows and movies such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Wars, and Dr. Who have depicted how we might communicate with devices, like robots, as individuals. For example, Star Wars’s C3PO android might be fluent in over 6 million forms of communication, but he is regarded as bothersome in every one, whereas R2D2’s tone-based BEEP BOOP language conveys emotion, personality, and information without a spoken word, and he is regarded as adorable. Figure 6-1 maps out different verbal and nonverbal robot personas used in popular ...