HCI research has for long been dedicated to better and more naturally facilitating information transfer between humans and machines. Unfortunately, humans’ most natural form of communication, speech, is also one of the most difficult modalities to be understood by machines – despite, and perhaps, because it is the highest-bandwidth communication channel we possess. As significant research efforts in engineering have been spent on improving machines’ ability to understand speech, research is only beginning to make the same improvements in understanding how to appropriately design these speech interfaces to be user-friendly and adoptable. Issues such as variations in error rates when processing speech, and difficulties in learnability and explainability (to name a few), are often in contrast with claims of success from industry. Along with this, designers themselves are making the transition to designing for speech and voice-enabled interfaces. Recent research has demonstrated the struggle for designers to translate their current experiences in graphical user interface design into speech interface design. Research has also noted the lack of any user-centered design principles or consideration for usability or usefulness in the same ways as graphical user interfaces have benefited from heuristic design guidelines.
Please join us at CHI 2024 if you want to learn about recent advances in voice and speech interface research, practices, and resources over the last decade, and who are interested in how to translate recent research from the conversational voice interface domain into practical tools that can be used in speech and voice interface design.
The course will be beneficial to all HCI researchers or practitioner who still believe in fulfilling HCI’s goal of developing methods and systems that allow humans to naturally interact with the ever increasingly ubiquitous mobile technology, but are disappointed with the lack of success in using speech and natural language to achieve this goal. This course will also benefit those who are disappointed with the lack of practical tools that are available to aid and guide designers on how to build usable speech interfaces, and would like to learn about the current advances in design tool development for speech interfaces.
Through this, we hope that HCI researchers and practitioners will learn how to combine recent advances in speech processing with user-centred principles in designing more usable and useful speech-based interactive systems.