Daniel has posted up a facinating entry about the viability of voice being the next generation UI and some of his experience to day with voice-enabled user interfaces. One of the really important things that Daniel touched on and what I would love to see him expand upon is the topic of emotion in user interface design.
In Daniel’s case we was made to feel self conscious about talking into the phone at a computer. Interestingly enough, thats completely illogical because people arround you have no idea you are talking to a computer, so unless you try to talk back to it like a robot there won’t be a problem.
Thats the thing about “User Emotion Design” (I just made that up – do you like it), its not always logical and in different scenarios a voice interface might make perfect sense.
One good example of where a user interface voice would make sense in elevators at large department stores and office blocks.
When I was younger my Grandmother took me to Myer in Brisbane and in the elevators in that building they had lift operators that sat on a stool in the corner and asked people where they wanted to go. Naturally, this was before they had algorithms to determine optimal routes to floors and optimal rest positions based on the time of day.
One of the neat features of this “user interface” was that you could ask it questions. For example you could say, I want to go to the floor that sells kids toys and the operator would wisk you up to the third floor.
Since then manual lift operators have all but disappeared (especially in office blocks where elevator space is precious at 8–9am in the morning) but the talking lift that tells you which floor you have currently stopped at the microscopic text next to floor buttons hasn’t really replicated the experience.
In this scenario voice could help quite a bit. In your average office block you could hop in the elevator and ask “I need to go to the Menzies meeting room”, at which point the elevator could go to the appropriate floor and provide instructions for getting from the lift to the room once you arrive at the correct floor. The vocabulary could be expanded to include any number of things such as where do you find a particular person, or where a good place to get lunch or a coffee is.
Once again we need to get over the emotional barrier, in this case of talking in the elevator which seems to be some kind of taboo in western society.