https://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/design/the-ux-of-voice-the-invisible-interface
It’s a brand new year, and by most reliable indicators – the latest demos at CES 2017, the buzz on all the tech blogs and even the pre-roll ads interrupting my binge watching of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – it looks like 2017 will be the year that voice interaction reaches mainstream adoption.
Voice interaction – the ability to speak to your devices, and have them understand and act upon whatever you’re asking them – was everywhere this year. Device manufacturers of all shapes and sizes heavily integrated voice capabilities into their offerings at CES 2017, with Amazon’s Alexa stealing the show as their AI platform of choice.
Meet your new interface – for everything
The rapid proliferation of voice interaction capabilities in our individual digital ecosystems raises critical questions for any designer whose work plays a role in the customer experience. It’s becoming clear that voice interaction will soon become an expected offering as either an alternative, or even a full replacement to, traditional visual interfaces.
Voice is poised to impact UX design, just as mobile touchscreens turned web design on its head – except this shift is going to arrive way faster, and far from being limited to screen-based interactions, the transformation is going to permeate every aspect of our users’ lives. As consumers start to talk to and be understood by their products, user-centered companies must learn to apply the same intentional design principles to these interactions as they do with visual interfaces, if they hope to satisfy users’ high expectations for this new wave of tech to “just work”.
In this post, we’re going to explain some of the profound implications of the rise of voice interaction for UX design. Just as the internet began as a playground of raw new technical capability that embraced the guiding principles of intuitive, user-friendly product design over time, so too I see today’s voice-enabled tools and devices in their infancy, with limitless potential ready to be unlocked through innovative, user-centered design.
Before we dive into the specific implications of voice for our industry, it’s important to understand some of the forces that are propelling the rapid adoption of this new interaction medium.
Accurate natural language processing has, until very recently, existed only in the realm of science fiction, in part because it takes a lot of computing power to break down and interpret human speech in real-time. 2016 saw numerous significant breakthroughs in language processing, and we’ve reached a tipping point where there’s enough computational power available to us to make speech recognition and interaction a viable alternative to visual interfaces.
“…improvements in natural language processing have set the stage for a revolution in how we interact with tech: more and more, we’re bypassing screens altogether through the medium of voice… Shawn DuBravac of CTA said that 2017 would represent an inflection point in voice recognition as computers reach parity with humans, accurately transcribing speech about 94% of the time. “We’re ushering in an entirely new era of faceless computing,” DuBravac said.” ~CES 2017: Key trends, J. Walter Thompson Intelligence
In an age where almost a third of the global population is carrying a microphone connected to a supercomputer in their pocket, it’s not hard to guess at the huge swath of people that are primed and ready to adopt voice interaction as their input method of choice.
Getting the machines to understand us correctly is just one milestone in the quest for frictionless voice interaction, but another is making it available to users across multiple use-cases and contexts.
Just as the availability of internet access was one of the major growth factors driving more people online, so the adoption of voice interaction will be limited by the variety of scenarios in which we can simply speak to our devices and be understood. Alexa demonstrated its viability at CES 2017 as such a unifying platform, based on the sheer number of software and hardware developers who’ve chosen to hop onboard thus far, as well as a massive 9X jump in sales numbers of their Echo devices. It may not be the ultimate incarnation of the medium, but it’s currently a strong favorite to become the first voice-driven application to truly find a mainstream audience.