Voice User Interface Design VUI

I recently ran across a series of posts and a SpeechTEK magazine article about a new service currently in Private Beta called Fonolo.

The premise is definitively very interesting. What this Canadian start-up is attempting to do is to replicate the concept of bookmarking and deep linking (process of linking pages in the lower levels of a Web site from a home page - or other pages - to help search engines index them) so common these days on the web. What this means for a phone user is that they don’t need to get to the application’s “home page” (aka Main Menu) every time to then have to traverse the phone tree to reach a specific destination…

According to their founder’s pitch, the way it works is that you “bookmark” a spot deep inside a telephone’s system tree. To do this, you go to the Fonolo’s website, find the Company you need, review a transcription of their menu structure, find the spot you need and click on it. By doing that, they call the company for you, navigate the menu up to that specific spot and call you back so you can continue your transaction from that point on.

How do they know what systems look like? Well, as noted in the VoIP weblog, they seem to be using a combination of voice recognition and human editors to generate “maps” of the interactive voice response system.

Aside from the obvious privacy concerns a service like this might raise, the hottest one in my opinion is the service they refer to as “Intelligent Call History”. Since in reality all your calls start from their home page, they are attempting to become something like a Google of sorts for “phone sites”. What I mean by that is that they would keep track of all the interactions you’ve had with a certain company (regardless of the phone you used), along with the actual recordings of those conversations!

In the web world, we’re all familiar with how certain companies keep logs that track your web habits which could then be linked to your IP address. The biggest difference to me is that they mostly keep track of where you’ve been and where you’re going, but not of what’s happening when you are there… and in this case, since you’re using them as a bridge to connect to a Company, how can you be sure those recordings (which may contain account numbers, PINs, etc.) are kept safe and out of anybody’s reach?

Presumably the advantage of something like this is that in case of a dispute, you could play back a recording from the actual conversation and prove a certain transaction happened. But is this benefit really worth the risk? Particularly when it is known that once it becomes available to the public, it will be ad-supported.

On the other hand, they have also expressed that their ultimate goal is to craft partnerships with those companies Fonolo has mapped so that those companies can notify them “when they change or update their IVR” to the point where they hope companies will indeed send transcripts of their IVRs so they don’t have to be mapped anymore

Again, I definitively like the idea of empowering users and allowing them to accomplish their task in the most efficient way, but I think a system like this would be a much better fit for an actual device feature (similar to the GOOG411 dedicated button now present in some phones) - which you could turn on at the beginning of a call and stop once you reach the spot you want to “bookmark” so that in the future your phone would simply repeat the steps you followed and get you to that same spot. And of course, rather than finding more ways to patch user-unfriendly architectures, companies should be looking at fixing the root problem, which in the short term can be somewhat addressed via the deployment of more SayAnything/ SpeakFreely-type menus so callers can say what it is they need right at the beginning of an application…

I know for some people Google’s announcement about Android wasn’t as exciting as the expectation of hearing them announce an actual “Gphone” (as it was often called there was still a rumor Google was working on an actual device), yet it seem implementations and applications based on this open and free mobile platform are finally coming out (albeit only as prototypes) and demonstrating how such an approach can in fact result in easier ways for consumers to obtain access to a wide variety of applications.

The prototype included a Google browser, phone dialer, audio player, Google maps, camera, games, calendar, contacts manager, calculator and notes. Sweet!

Since it seems the idea itself and its implementation are definitively feasible, it seems now the only remaining questions have to do with all the other non-technical reasons that will have a definitive impact on other players in the wireless and mobile arena. As Gigaom cleverly pointed out, some of those include:

1. All users of carriers that aren’t part of the Open Handset Alliance
2. Device-makers which now have to worry about yet another OS
3. Application developers, which will now have to deal with a significant number of handset/carrier/OS combinations
4. Support departments at participating carriers dealing with non-supported application issues
5. Users having to adapt to yet another set of user interfaces and frameworks

And to this I would like to add a 6th one: “UI Designers having to deal with new interaction paradigms, higher customer expectations, while maintaining design simplicity.”

This is definitively a great opportunity for us UI designers to start thinking about new challenges we’ll be facing when these applications/frameworks become available to the masses, in particular when user habits and natural ways of interacting with them call for the use of speech recognition as either the primary way of interaction, or as a back-up/supportive mode for certain types of goals and contexts.

After catching-up on all the topics and discussions from the vuids group that came out around the Holiday season, the idea that seemed to kept coming up was that it’s still very hard (if not harder) for designers to get designs done right, mostly due to external reasons (things sold the wrong way, business requirements, picky customers, etc.) and particularly when businesses don’t want to pay attention to what designers have to say.

Furthermore, the idea of picking the *right* technology for the job (touchtone, speech, SLMs, or plain-old agents) is the right idea yet not widely supported (by sales people in particular).

Therefore I wanted to share with you this jewel from TED by David Pogue which I just recently ran across which reinforces the point that “simplicity sells”. Funny to think it’s a couple of years old, but keeps being as true now as it was back then. In particular, I loved the part about Palm having a “tap counter” to make sure no task required more than a limited number of taps on a Palm device, which makes me wonder if our projects wouldn’t benefit from having a “word counter”, a “choices counter” and a “menu levels counter”

Enjoy!

Forget about Persona! We all know personalization is the new black, and everyone strives to make devices, systems and interactions as individualized as possible so as to gain better and faster acceptance.

I’m glad to see these ideas are starting to expand to new areas. In this particular case, I recently learned about a company called YourPND which basically allows you to record your own navigation voice recordings using your own computer and a microphone. Getting the full prompt set done takes about 7 minutes, and after that, the system creates a file ready to be used by your navigation device along with the installation instructions.

And not only that, but they take this concept of recording your own instructions a step further and encourage users to get creative by either adding your own catchphrases, or by using them as a gift to others (imagine grandpa following little Jimmy’s directions to get to their house) in the form of a USB flash drive containing all the instructions.

It’s currently only available in Dutch with an English version coming out soon. Furthermore, it only works on TomTom’s navigation devices even though other systems are scheduled to be supported as well. But at any rate, this is a pretty good idea which definitively adds a personal touch to automation and gives us a clue about some of the things we can try to make automation a little more interesting, fun and “familiar”.

So, anyone looking forward to hear “I’m sorry, I still didn’t hear myself”?

That’s right. How many times have you been outside and saw one of those humongous ad displays telling you about the next great thing since sliced bread? Well, what if you could now interact with those displays, and not only that, but even be able to play with other bystanders!

I’ve seen similar things in shopping centers where an overhead projector displays ads on the floor with which kids can interact. For example, a sports brand may display a soccer ball within the projected image and kids start to kick the ball around the ad in an attempt to score a goal.

But this is the first time I’ve heard about someone taking that to the next level by targeting to adults and allowing them to interact with it using any cell phone!

Megaphone has created this innovative way to engage crowds and let them interact with advertisements. As I mentioned, all you need is a cell phone which then becomes a game controllers you can then use to shoot other players or fire weapons at space-alien attackers while seeing their own phone avatar along with those of other players. Some games are played with your telephone keypad while some others are controlled with your voice. Sweet!

As you can see in the videos below, the games have a certain ‘retro’ vibe which makes them very appealing and reflect the simplicity of the game, making it easy for anyone to join in.

It seems in this new era of YouTube shows and video-generated content, it wouldn’t take long after the success of some of those SNL sketches for someone to come up with a full-fledged movie in our space - the Call Center Movie.

We all need a good laugh every now and then, plus it doesn’t hurt to remember that self-service solutions aren’t always worse than having a human being on the other end of the phone… Enjoy!

A friend of mine sent me this, and I thought it was really funny. It seems IVRs are entering prime time television not only in the US (as seen in the “Saturday Night Live” sketches of Julie) but in other countries too. It is interesting how even though we all speak different languages, we always somehow manage to repeat the same mistakes in any language, don’t you think?

Unfortunately, the interaction isn’t that far off from some of the actual live calls I’ve heard from systems our there in productions - specially trying to avoid transferring the caller, but we’re all working on fixing that, right?

You can watch the video below, and if you don’t speak French, here’s a brief transcript of the interaction so you can read and weep:

• “Lady” calls in but person isn’t available (gets voicemail message)
• Attempts to leave voice message but system interrupts with “If you’re satisfied with your message, press 1.”
• Caller says she isn’t satisfied and again is interrupted by “To record it again, press 2.”
• Caller presses 2… and the advanced dialog begins… the system says “You’ve pressed 2. If you’re satisfied with choosing 2, press 1.”
• Caller presses 1, system says “You’ve pressed 1. Press 3 if you’ve chosen 1 because you’re satisifed with your message. Or 4 if you’ve chosen 1 because you’re satisfied with pressing 2 because you’re not satisfied with your message.”
• Caller hesitates to system helps with “Press 5 if you want 10 more seconds to press 3 because you want 2, or press 6 for 10 seconds to press 4 because you want 1 because you would like 2. Press 7 to start over. 8 to hear this again. Or 9 to not hear it anymore.”
• Caller presses 7 so system asks “Was that 9?”
• You get the picture…

For those of us who are members of the Yahoo VUIDs group, you probably recently noticed an interesting (and heated) exchange of opinions on some of Saturday Night Live’s Parodies about “Julie” - the lovely Persona from Amtrak’s automated response system.

The sad part is that there are quite a few systems out there on the field that really sound and feel like that, so what’s depicted as a parody I’ve run across more than once when listening to callers interacting with speech recognition systems.

But hey! Who says you can’t learn a little bit more about Voice User Interface Design while having some fun? So… considering it stirred a little bit of controversy and to end it on a high note, I found a copy of the aforementioned video and would like to share it with everyone. Enjoy!

Summary: Monotone-speaking telephone operator Julie (Rachel Dratch) meets a man (Antonio Banderas) at a cocktail party.

Anyone building any Julies lately?