Hey,
nice comments and I generally agree. I speak from someone who has
worked a number of years in this space (VUI design, IVR's etc).
Speech recognition can be useful, but only when applied to the right
application space and for the right reasons. Take for example Goog-411,
1-800-555-1212, or TellMe - each of these are highly useful
applications - but they are phone based. Speech rec is far from perfect
- its only probabilistic. If there is a more sure fire way of entering
the data, then by all means do it. Anothre of the problems is that the
speech recognition applications are often designed by engineers who
don't think like the end user (as described in Alan Cooper's "The
Inmates are Running the Asylum"). I know, I am guilty of that myself
till I started to see the problems.
For anyone really interested in this topic, I would recommend Bruce
Balentine's new book "It's Better to be a Good Machine than a Bad
Person" (ICMI Press). Its a fun read, but pokes fun at the over
application of ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) which happens all the
time.
One parting comment is that I think the jury may still be out on
multimodal speech systems. Combinations of speech and GUI can be
useful, especially when the user can switch back and forth between
modalities. If its too noisy they can easily use the keyboard,
touchscreen, etc, or visa versa.
best,
'mark
William Brall wrote:
The general consensus amount IxDs is that voice command is a terrible
control idiom. It is incomplete, lacks detail and requires extensive
verbosity to outline a clear goal.
However, engineers and people who don't think hard about how voice
command will actually work, seem to think it is the next best thing.
Even if the computer were made less literal. Even if it inferred like
a real person. There will still be a level of, "Oh, I'll just do it
myself!"
This is because that already exists with people. I hear it at work
all the time. Either one party can't articulate his thoughts, or the
other party can't understand a proper articulation.
This won't get any better with computers, it can only get worse.
Walking into a room and saying "Lights" or "Lights On" seems
romantic and sci-fi. But in reality, a well placed light switch is
better. And as much as you pretend it is lazy to speak rather than
perform an action. Speaking takes more cognitive effort.
This is why the clapper was successful. It could have been geared to,
and I believe you can activate them with, any loud noise. That
includes yelling "Lights".
However, there are situations where being able to talk to a computer
is good. Telephony is an example where good voice recognition will
make automated phone systems easier to deal with. So long as they
stop pretending to be people. Let them sound robotic. We expect it.
Hell, we WANT it. And it is a bit creepy when they don't sound
robotic.
Digital companions, and video games, are situations where being able
to understand language will provide more immersion and enjoyment.
And there are situations where talk is the best option. A robot maid
would be best controlled by voice. This is already how maids are
controlled. And "clean the bathroom, and use the productA not
productB." is all the control that is really needed.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36596
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