Название: The Elements of Voice First Style: A Practical Guide to Voice User Interface Design (Early Release)
Автор: Ahmed Bouzid, Weiye Ma
Издательство: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Год: 2021-11-16
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub
Размер: 10.1 MB

If you're a new or experienced designer of conversational voice-first experiences, this handy reference provides actionable answers to key aspects of eyes-busy, hands-busy, voice-only user interfaces. Designed as a companion to books about conversational voice design, this guide includes important details regarding eyes-free, hands-free, voice-only interfaces delivered by Amazon Echo, Google Nest, and a variety of in-car experiences.

Authors Ahmed Bouzid and Weiye Ma provide far-field voice best practices and recommendations in a manner similar to The Elements of Style, the popular American English writing style guide. Like that book, The Elements of Voice First Style provides direct, succinct explanations that focus on the essence of each topic. You'll find answers quickly without having to spend time searching through other sources.

Voice telephony systems, otherwise known as the unloved Interactive Voice Response (IVR), where humans call a phone number with the intent to speak with another human only to be unpleasantly met by a system that tries to speak and listen were the first interactive speech technologies deployed for mainstream use and did go mainstream in the early 2000s. And although they did deliver value, notwithstanding the understandably justified grousing from users, they somehow didn’t count as the fulfillment of the “Speech is just around the corner” aspiration. It was not until the launch of the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011 (one day before the death of Steve Jobs) that one could arguably say that speech had arrived: Siri was born and interactive speech was now available, on demand, for the tens of millions of people who owned an iPhone.

The arrival of Siri was a watershed moment not only because interactive speech was now available on a smartphone, but because the type of speech-based interactions that it delivered were fundamentally different from the ones that users were encountering in IVR systems. The key difference lies in the basic fact that when someone calls a phone number, they intend to speak to a human being. When they encounter an automated system instead, they have to decide whether or not they want to interact with it, immediately ask for an agent (or “zero-out”), or simply hang up. With Siri, in contrast, the user is willingly engaging in speech automation. When they press and hold the home button (as the first interactions with Siri had the user do), they are not expecting to speak to a human: they instead expect and want to speak to the speech app. In other words, the user wants to self-serve using speech and is not intending to speak to a human. This was a first for mainstream voice technology.

The Amazon Echo was the first device to deliver on three fundamental aspects of the voice interface that made it a candidate for fulfilling the promise of Speech technology: (1) It was an interface where the user engaged the Speech system willingly; (2) The interface enabled far field interactions: meaning that the user did not need to place the device near their mouth as they had to with the smartphone and dictation microphones; and (3) Most crucially, the user could engage with it while both their eyes and their hands were busy: they didn’t need to look at anything or touch anything to interact with the speech system. We, the authors of this book, are very much of that generation.

This book focuses on a very specific type of interface: the voice-first interface -- or “voicebot” for short from now on. This is the interface that helps users with interactions where their eyes and their hands are not at their disposal -- or choose not have them at their disposal: they are under the hood of the car fixing an oil leak, are potting a plant, are taking a shower, are lying in bed, half asleep, are preparing food, are in their car, are blind or have temporarily lost sight, are folding clothes and watching TV, are tidying up the house, are walking the dog, are having a face to face conversation with someone, are on a zoom call, are typing away at their laptop, are pecking at their smartphone, are in a museum staring at a painting. It is the challenge of designing for those myriad types of use cases that this book is for.

Therefore, this book does not touch on designing for non-voice, text-based chat bots. Nor does it propose to help designers build multimodal interfaces. Designing multimodal interfaces, even those where voice is a central modality and the other modalities (screen, touch, haptic) play a supporting role, is an entirely different endeavor. Often, novice designers make the mistake of thinking that voice-centric multi-modality as something like ‘voice-first plus,’ when in reality it is its very own, separate type of interface, as different from voice-first as it is from visual multi-modality, where the visual modality and not voice is at the center of the interface (for instance, the smartphone or the smart tablet).

With this guide, you'll be able to:

Craft just the right language to enable your voicebot to effectively communicate with humans
Create conversational voice interfaces that are robust enough to handle errors and failures
Design highly usable conversational voice interfaces by paying attention to small details that can make or break the experience
Build a design for a voice-only smart speaker that doesn't require customers to use their eyes or hands