Voice User Interface Design VUI

Techcrunch along with other news services and blogs are continuously reporting and providing updates on Guy Kawasaki’s newest venture: Truemors.

The service basically allows you to report ‘rumors’ via email, text messaging, and yes… phone. They have a partnership with Spinvox which I wrote about back in February as a startup to watch because they provided “voice-to-screen” messaging, or in this case, “voice to rumor”.

Once again, it is becoming obvious to me that the future of Speech Technologies will not be as a stand-alone technology in the Call Center/Self-Service industry but rather as a complimentary technology to other Web 2.0-like technologies that give customers full control over when and how to interact with them.

Once these sorts of technology integrations reach mainstream adoption, the question will turn out to be if existing Speech Service vendors/providers will be able to offer, understand and deliver a compelling and seamless experience for our customers’ customers. In other words, are we ready for Speech 2.0?

Apparently so… I’ve been using Tellme and its services for a long time. Some of them were extremely good - such as the Traffic Report application which then got phased out once the government implemented local 511 services such as the one in Arizona.

On the other hand, Web 2.0 seems to be surrounded by a series of keywords such as blogs, podcasts, social networks, etc., one of which I really felt would apply to Tellme. But then today I was reading a report from the Web 2.0 Expo talking about the Top 5 Web 2.0 services from the conference, and certainly enough, Tellme was at the top of the list thanks to its new downloadable application that allows you to get useful business and directory listing information on your mobile devices and phones.

In particular, I think the multi-modal functionality provided by the application is a clear indication of how companies can leverage some of these Web 2.0 technologies. In the case of Tellme, you can call in and find 411-like information using speech recognition, you can send a text message with your request, or you can download the application to your phone and get the results displayed on the phone screen.

Kudos for Tellme for *discovering* that users not only want features, but want control over the interactions as well as freedom of choice on how the want to interact with it. Any other applications like this out there?

C-Net recently announced a new service by Google that allows you to perform Local Voice Search.

The service is pretty straightforward: you dial an 800 number, and via speech recognition, you can say the category of business you’re looking for or the name of the business you need and will be connected to that business for free (even though it was reported there were some recognition issues with business names).

This makes things really interesting considering Microsoft recently acquired Local Voice Search capabilities as well through the acquisition of Tellme.

The Google Blog has more details about the service itself: “Google Voice Local Search lets you search for local businesses from any phone and for free. You can find a business listing by category, send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS, it is fully automated, and connects you free of charge.”

As VUI designers, we all struggle with how to make phone interfaces and self-service easier to use and more convenient for our users. So in a sense, we’ve become “phone slaves” - with the customers on one side, the business owners on the other, and the telephone limitations (such as its audio-only delivery) on top.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the challenge, especially when you can design and build something that is creative enough that it satisfies all those requirements without having to compromise.

So it’s nice when I run across things like GrandCentral, where someone provides us with a great tool, at a great price (free!), letting us have a single universal phone number that then makes all other registered phones ring (home, office, cell phone) making us accessible all the time, giving us freedom to choose how to answer the call, and even letting you forward an ongoing call to a different phone. There’s a very good video review at the NY Times.

Since it is VoIP based, you get other features such as being able to access voicemail over the web, record calls on progress (great for Usability tests :), define your own custom greetings for each caller, and even letting you pick an Mp3 song your callers will hear while you pick up the phone. Sweet… give it a try!

Reading an article on Business2.0 this month, I ran across an interesting article that talked about 25 startups leading the Web 2.0 revolution.

There was one in particular that caught my eye since it shows an innovative use of Speech Recognition technologies.

The name of the company is Simulscribe and what they do is offer an effective way to convert voice-mail into scannable text. SimulScribe transcribes voice-mail messages and shoots them to your mobile device as text or e-mail messages. Targeting corporate customers, SimulScribe will integrate the service into company voicemail systems. Founded in 2003, they already have 5,000 users and offer a plan called “Simul40″ where you basically get 40 voice-mail messages to text conversions for $9.95

Furthermore, there’s another company out there called Spinvox which does a very similar thing - or as they call it, “Voice-to-screen messaging” - which is free and available in multiple languages! (without some bells and whistles such as voice mail management through any web browser)

Now if they could only find a way to process the message to extract what’s really important and get to the point

I’ve recently being readying about all the ongoing efforts to improve the security of Microsoft’s new Vista Operating System, but I never thought I would find out that one of the first flaws being publicized since the public launch of Vista earlier this week would have to do with its Speech Recognition capabilities.

Apparently an attacker can run malicious programs by using prerecorded verbal commands, ultimately meaning you can “shout-hack” a system.

“Microsoft has also recommended that users who are concerned about having their computer shout-hacked should either disable the speaker or microphone, turn off the speech recognition feature, or shut down Windows Media Player if they encounter a file that tries to execute voice commands on their system.”

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