
Tips for Building Voice User Interfaces - MatthewPhillips
https://phillipsoft.com/alexa/tips-for-building-vui.html
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nmstoker
I like that the article formalises this, but one concern is that the "whys"
seem defined by currently available uses and thus it's limiting.

I don't doubt that there are plenty of good practical/psychological reasons
that these narrowly defined cases will work best and I respect that, but it
feels like it will hardly push the envelope if we mimic rather than exceed.

Clearly it's good to walk before you try to run but as the quality of NLP and
speech recognition improves and people become more comfortable, I would hope
to see growth around more open ended uses. Voice could ditch the specificity
that apps and GUIs demand - you need to be in the right app to do a task but
voice could open up a vast range of access (continuing how Alexa and Google
Home already aggregate skills). This opens up more challenges around ambiguity
(it's well known with the ubiquitous "play X for me" command that could often
be handled by many skills) but that's part of what makes it interesting.

Lastly I totally agree with those pointing out the speed issue - the right
tool for the right job applies as always.

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jraines
Aside from the well known problem of discoverability, there are two things
that kill me about VUIs:

1) Slowness. Not just the lag before you start talking, which I presume will
get reduced to basically nothing, but the speed of the assistants speech and
their verbosity. I wish you could make them talk faster and also enable some
sort of “terse mode”

2) Chaining. I wish they’d listen after the last action for a few seconds and
in that state be able to act on things like “do that again” or refer to the
main subject of the last answer like “...and what movies was she in last
year”?

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tenaciousDaniel
What's interesting is that if you think about it long enough, you'll realize
that the vast majority of words you use, whether in speech or writing, are
purely there for social reasons.

Imagine asking your boss out for lunch. You might say something like "Hi
[boss], I was wondering if we could have lunch today. Let me know if you are
busy."

Now imagine asking your friend out for lunch. You could probably get away with
just saying "lunch?"

Machines can, and should, do the same thing. Building socially-determined
speech patterns into bots is awkward and a waste of time, and even if people
don't consciously know that, they can _feel_ it.

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alfonsodev
Not sure people know or feel that, there is no previous experience with this
(for the masses) and maybe people relate to what sci-fi movies and books have
taught us, and that’s what we expect.

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rkagerer
I'd love to see a voice platform which decouples functions from phrases,
allowing a community of "command makers" to create their own deeply customized
commands.

I'm not convinced the developer of an app or service is necessarily the best
suited to be crafting the voice experience. Give power users who actually
interact with the thing on a daily basis a decent tool to do some tailoring
between your API and your audience, and they'll fix your crappy edge cases and
produce more useful interactions. Now add a mechanism to discover and
proliferate the best of breed results.

It's similar to how Apple or Google create the mobile platform, but 3rd party
developers are the ones who really understand the needs of a particular group
of users.

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Nextgrid
Most people barely know how to use basic features of their tools and can't be
bothered to spend 30 minutes exploring them, do you really expect them to
spend time researching & testing custom commands to improve their voice
assistants?

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rkagerer
You raise a great point. I _don 't_ expect most people to. But I know some
power users who would. And I suspect a huge library of human-crafted commands
would be more useful than (or at least compliment) a mediocre AI.

Back before there were better alternatives, I reverse engineered the protocol
for a common Wifi RGB LED controller and glued it to the Alexa Skills API.
Amazon has a great developer tool for training your own verbs and syntax.
Unfortunately, all your vocabulary needs to be prefixed. So instead of saying
"Turn my yard light red", I had to say "Tell Sparky to turn my yard light
red".

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sys_64738
If I can't speak then how should I interact with a voice interface?

