Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

Summary

An essential book for user interface designers is Jakob Nielsen's Usability Engineering. In this book, Nielsen describes the notion of double experts. Double experts are usability professionals with expertise in the type of interface being developed. They have been found to be more effective usability engineers than “single experts.” As a designer of speech user interfaces, a certain amount of expertise as a user of speech interfaces is required. The current cadre of speech recognition suites is affordable and offers the consumer and interface designer a marvelous introduction to speech technology. Becoming a frequent user of even one of these suites will allow you to have firsthand experience of the usability issues your users will face. In addition, gaining familiarity with the capabilities and limitations of the commercial development tools for speech software will assist you in becoming a more effective interface designer. Familiarity with such tools requires an understanding of speech-related computer hardware, which is the subject of Chapter 7.