Chapter 15
Designing a Speech-enabled App
What's in this chapter?
Understanding Android's speech capabilities
Introducing the user interface screen flow
Designing a voice user interface
Soliciting feedback from users
People love using speech to command their phones for many reasons. One reason is that they sometimes prefer dictation rather than awkwardly typing text into a small keyboard. Another reason is that they need access to their devices while they are in the world. For example, they are pleased when they can be driving and still compose messages to send to their friends.
These reasons may seem anecdotal, but the proof is in the downloads. Some apps that use speech are popular. Google Voice Actions, for example, is an app that enables users to perform a wide variety of tasks from a single voice prompt. It has more than one million downloads.
The downloads do not come easy, however. Allowing users to speak to their devices is challenging to design and implement. Android supports speech input and output with APIs for speech recognition and Text-to-Speech (TTS). Using the APIs effectively is only part of the task. The other part is designing and implementing a complete voice user interface (VUI) with all its supporting components.
A VUI is a user interface that utilizes a user's speech as input, pre-recorded or synthesized speech for output, or both. A VUI consists of a set of voice actions, where each voice action allows the user to perform a certain task.
A well-designed ...
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