Voice User Interface Design VUI

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”?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Fun Stuff, Speech Industry, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.