Voice User Interface Design

Chapter 6. Creating Persona, by Design

In helping customers design their VUIs, we ask them many questions about their corporate identity and brand and about typical users of the system (see Chapter 4). The intent of such questions is to help the designer arrive at the most appropriate “character” or “personality” for the interface, which the user is bound to infer in even a single interaction. In response to these questions, however, we sometimes hear, “Oh, this app isn't going to have a personality.” A substantive body of research, though, shows that we humans cannot help inferring personality traits and social information from the voices we hear, even if we encounter them as brief, recorded samples.

We infer not only the speaker's gender but ...