Summary

Most people who design GUIs have some level of training in visual design. However, the educational and professional development systems within our industry do not typically provide opportunities to learn about the building blocks of speech user interfaces. While the visual interface designer works with fonts, shapes, colors, and widgets, the building blocks for the speech interface designer are sounds, words, and sentences. A designer has only as much freedom as they have knowledge. The quality of a speech interface is partially determined by the designer's knowledge of the nature of language. However, quality is also impacted by the designer's knowledge of the speech technologies discussed in our next chapter.

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