Voice User Interface Design

This book is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to voice user interface (VUI) design. The VUI is perhaps the most critical factor in the success of any automated speech recognition (ASR) system, determining whether the user experience will be satisfying or frustrating, or even whether the customer will remain one. This book describes a practical methodology for creating an effective VUI design. The methodology is scientifically based on principles in linguistics, psychology, and language technology, and is illustrated here by examples drawn from the authors' work at Nuance Communications, the market leader in ASR development and deployment.

The book begins with an overview of VUI design issues and a description of the technology. The authors then introduce the major phases of their methodology. They first show how to specify requirements and make high-level design decisions during the definition phase. They next cover, in great detail, the design phase, with clear explanations and demonstrations of each design principle and its real-world applications. Finally, they examine problems unique to VUI design in system development, testing, and tuning. Key principles are illustrated with a running sample application.

A companion Web site provides audio clips for each example: www.VUIDesign.org

The cover photograph depicts the first ASR system, Radio Rex: a toy dog who sits in his house until the sound of his name calls him out. Produced in 1911, Rex was among the few commercial successes in earlier days of speech recognition. Voice User Interface Design reveals the design principles and practices that produce commercial success in an era when effective ASRs are not toys but competitive necessities.

Michael Cohen is the cofounder of Nuance Communications. He has played a variety of roles at Nuance, including creation of the Professional Services organization and the Dialog Research and Development group. Michael is a popular speaker and a consulting professor at Stanford University. He has published more than seventy papers, holds eight patents.

James Giangola is an industrial linguist, who designs, researches, and mentors others in creating VUIs that reflect the linguistic features and principles that shape everyday, human-to-human conversations. An innovator in prompt-writing and dialog design, James has ten years of experience teaching languages and linguistics, and maintains a consulting practice.

Jennifer Balogh is a speech consultant at Nuance Communications, where she designs and evaluates interfaces for spoken language systems. She also conducts research on dialog design techniques and holds several patents. Jennifer is a university lecturer and frequent contributor to conferences and journals.

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