Episode Summary
In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss the rise of voice recognition and voice user interfaces. More so than any other interface type, the VUI has the potential to be seamless and "magical". We've all used Siri, and there are plenty of VUI's for car dashboards, but what's coming down the road? From a first take on the new Amazon Echo to the future possibilities of voice services, we share our thoughts on the landscape of speech recognition.
Here are a few quotes from this week's discussion.
Jon on the promise of the VUI:
I think more so than a lot of other interface types, the VUI has the potential to be this seamless interface between man and machine. I think we’re so used to the idea of touch screens now or point-and-click interfaces that we basically grew up on or you can have the controllers for your gaming systems or if you’re a coder or just an old-school computer user, maybe you’re used to the command line interface. All of these interfaces are a slight hurdle to get the information from your head into this machine, into the computer. I think more so than any of these other types, the voice user interface seems natural, seems like what you should be doing when you’re trying to convey information. Certainly, it’s what we do with each other every day. We convey information from person to person all the time just using our voice. We do all kinds of business transactions that way. We attend conferences where we learn things or go to school. Pretty much every transaction in our life has some voice element to it, with the exception of some of these other user interfaces that we use. For me, the idea that voice is going to become at least one of the next frontiers for user experience design, I find really exciting.
Dirk on the failed implementation of VUI products so far:
Oh, I don’t find it exciting at all. Yeah. I can’t jump on the happy, happy, joy, joy train with you, my friend. I’ve got two issues with it. One is that the promise of it just is never realized. I am an Apple user for the most part and I have Siri, and, I don’t know, I find that Siri screws up half-ish of the time. If I say, “John Smith,” Siri gets it. If there’s any kind of nuance or longer, more complicated stuff, it’s a shit show. I don’t even really bother with Siri anymore unless I’m driving, there’s no way I can drive and text and I’m really under some duress to have to try voice. There’s just too many fails and this is pretty close to the latest and greatest in voice recognition technology. The inability to recognize my voice, recognize my intent, and to garble it into some crap really is poor.
