"Voice is the new touch". This is a slogan that's now spreading fast, one that I'd like to claim my own. (I've used it since 2007 when I was in charge of arranging NRC demos to Nokia World and insisted on including Simone, an interactive voice based application. One can only wonder why it is not in products yet). But, to the point: The mobile industry went touch-crazy after iPhone came out, and lost sight to the fact that us humans have five different senses that we use for communicating with each other. Using a mechanical device between us, should bring additional benefits to communications, and not restrict using our natural senses. Yet this is what the industry offers us. Only one truth at a time, as concluded in the previous post, too.

Voice UI, or Audio UE as I've also tried to market it, refers to the way for a human and his/her device to be able to communicate with each other using a natural spoken language. The theory behind includes the idea that the device learns and grows with the person, so that the person doesn't need to learn and grow with the device. This is the essence of usability, and the core in inclusive design.
Sadly, when I've tried to sell this idea to some smart people, their response is that using voice will result in privacy issues, or that it will be difficult to use in a noisy envrionment. Well, the simple and easy anser is that when someone actually designs a device with a Voice UI, they would also include other input/output methods as well. It's called multimodality. Sometimes an engineer is very good in coming up with excuses for not doing something that he himself doesn't find cool, forgetting that their job usually is not to do cool things for other engineers, but useful things for normal people.

The trigger for this outburst is an article at the Tech Review, which presents a research area that can bring the ultimate universal design experience closer to reality. It's a software that uses the microphone on a mobile phone to track and interpret a user's activity by picking up sounds and trying to classify them into categories as "voice," "music," or "ambient noise." Identifying the sounds that your phone's microphone picks up can also link you to a certain location. In testing, the software was able to correctly determine when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving in the car. It also picked up the noise of an ATM machine and a fan in a particular room.

This is really exciting. All we need now is a smart company who would start to look into productization. I predict great victory to that phone manufacturer who will understand the simple biological fact: We humans are a seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting  species, and no matter how many touch products are in the shops we won't stop talking and listening.



Source: Dartmouth College

PS. While claiming slogans, I call dibs for "Africa is the new India" as well