Chapter 3Voice in the User Interface
Andrew Breen, Hung H. Bui, Richard Crouch, Kevin Farrell, Friedrich Faubel, Roberto Gemello, William F. Ganong III, Tim Haulick, Ronald M. Kaplan, Charles L. Ortiz, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Holger Quast, Adwait Ratnaparkhi, Vlad Sejnoha, Jiaying Shen, Peter Stubley and Paul van Mulbregt
Nuance Communications, Inc.
3.1 Introduction
Voice recognition and synthesis, in conjunction with natural language understanding, are now widely viewed as essential aspects of modern mobile user interfaces (UIs). In recent years, these technologies have evolved from optional ‘add-ons’, which facilitated text entry and supported limited command and control, to the defining aspects of a wide range of mainstream mobile consumer devices, for example in the form of voice-driven smartphone virtual assistants. Some commentators have even likened the recent proliferation of voice recognition and natural language understanding in the UI as the “third revolution” in user interfaces, following the introduction of the graphical UI controlled by a mouse, and the touch screen, as the first and second respectively.
The newfound prominence of these technologies is attributable to two primary factors: their rapidly improving performance, and their ability to overcome the inherent structural limitations of the prevalent ‘shrunken desktop’ mobile UI by accurately deducing user intent from spoken input.
The explosive growth in the use of mobile devices of every sort has been ...
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