CIS 524 week 5 discussion 1 – Command and Natural Language

Command and Natural Language

With the technology we have today, people are used to using voice recognition on smartphones and in cars. The future of this technology is that voice interfaces will expand to other areas of our daily lives. Similar to life in the cartoon, The Jetsons, our kitchens and other areas throughout the home could be equipped with technology that can be controlled by voice recognition. There are some challenges with trying to implement voice interfaces within products. Three such challenges are a lack of trust, discovery issues, and simple usability concerns. Even the most refined and creative voice recognition system in the world will fail if it does not support users the way it was expected to.

1. The president of your company approached you with his iPhone in one hand and his iPad in the other. He has just purchased the iPhone 4S and is fascinated with Siri, the voice recognition software. He then pulls up an app your team developed for the company a few months ago and tells you that he wants it to work with voice commands just like Siri. When you pass this information on to your team, the news is met with groans and angry expressions. One of your developers tells you that it would be way too complicated to add voice recognition into the app and that you should have said no. Suggest three techniques to overcome the challenges of implementing natural language into interface designs.

Lack of trust – When people talk, there is a natural cadence that leads us from start to finish within a conversation. Virtual personal assistants (i.e. Siri or Alexa) should offer the same, because the closer an interaction follows the path of natural conversation, the more trusted and understandable it will be. One of the biggest hurdles to a voice system achieving trust is inconsistency. Product designers are applying voice and natural language to devices that already boast established and accepted input methods, and a key step toward trust will be voice technologies first reproducing and then improving upon these established methods.

Discovery Issues – Users need to know that they can speak to a system and what kinds of things they can say to get the system to respond back appropriately. Guiding users around what they can say is often very challenging. Incorporating proactivity into the system design can reduce the challenge of discovering what a user can talk to a personal assistant or voice system about.

Usability Concerns – As natural language systems build this trust and become easy to discover, people will experiment with them and make requests that aren’t supported. Systems must be flexible enough to account for the unknown inquiry. As technology improves and incorporates user input, usability concerns should diminish and voice interfaces should improve greatly.

The basic goals of language design are: Precision, Compactness, Ease in writing and reading, Completeness, Speed in learning, Simplicity to reduce errors, and Ease of retention over time Higher-level goals include: Close correspondence between reality and the notation, Convenience in carrying out manipulations relevant to users’ tasks, Compatibility with existing notations, Flexibility to accommodate novice and expert users, Expressiveness to encourage creativity, and Visual appeal Constraints on a language include: The capacity for human beings to record the notation The match between the recording and the display media (for example, clay tablets, paper, printing presses) The convenience in speaking (vocalizing)

1. Sally, a young developer, requests a meeting with you to discuss a project. Sally tells you that she wants to develop a new application in a computer language she has developed, hoping to use the project as proof of concept for her newly developed language. Your firm encourages technological development and advancement and has allowed similar developments to happen in the past. Discuss with Sally what is required to be considered an effective computer language. Suggest three characteristics that make up an effective computer language. Support your response with evidence from the textbook or an article you found.

Successful languages advance to serve the above mentioned goals within the above mentioned constraints. Effective computer languages must not only represent the users’ tasks and satisfy human needs for communication, but also be in sync with devices for recording, manipulating, and displaying these languages on a computer. Some examples of successful computer languages are: C, C++, C#, Java, SQL and command languages.

References:

Schneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Cohen, M., Jacobs, S. (2010). Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction (5th ed.). Boston, MA. Pearson.