Tutorial: 14. Designing Speech User Interfaces

Nicole Yankelovich, Sun Microsystems Lab; Jennifer Lai, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Benefits
You will explore techniques for designing speech user interfaces by examining existing products and research prototypes.

Origins
This is a new tutorial for CHI 98.

Features

• learn about basic concepts of speech input (recognition) and output (synthesis)
• understand the breadth of products and types of applications where speech is used
• discover design issues that affect both multimodal and speech-only systems including techniques for providing user feedback, strategies for designing effective prompts, methods for handling user and system errors
• examine a range of user studies that are appropriate at different stages of a speech application's life cycle

Audience
User interface designers and application developers who are interested in understanding the issues involved in designing effective speech interfaces. Participants are not expected to have prior knowledge of the basic underlying speech input and output concepts.

Presentation
Lecture and small-group exercises.

Instructors
Nicole Yankelovich is a Principal Investigator of the Speech Applications project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. She specializes in designing speech user interfaces and has published numerous papers on user interface design, speech applications and hypertext. Jennifer Lai has been working with the Speech Recognition effort at IBM Research for 9 years. She has conducted requirements gathering, design, development and usability testing for speech systems, including the IBM product MedSpeak/Radiology. She has published papers on the use of speech in multimedia systems, the development of statistical language models and has the patent for a Method and System for Natural Language Translation.