Jeffrey Humble - The Future of Voice UI

I fix Derrick you touched on some things with voice I'm gonna go a little bit deeper on so I work for a company in Berlin called career foundry what we do we're in the business of Education we teach people how to become UX designers like yourselves as well as UI designers and web developers and we did some research for a new course we were going to create over the UI design voice user face user interface design so that's where this talk came from I'm gonna talk a little bit about where or how the voice interface kind of rose to where it is now a little bit about how Boise user interfaces will be and then seven reasons what I think it'll be extremely magical in the future so the rise of the voice interface this is probably the first time you ever saw a voice interface was Google pioneering their voice search within a few short years it accounted for 20% of all searches on Google and then maybe you remember this this little icon this is the Siri a p-- icon so it started off as an app in 2010 and in two short months Apple bought the company and they started selling it as hardware on their phones so Apple is making very clear commitment early on to put voice user interfaces inside everything that they do and then a few years later on 2014 the Amazon echo came along and it's been the main competitor in voice user interfaces ever since and you know it's a standalone smart assistant I think these things are coming too or Amazon is gonna be selling these things in Turkey soon so maybe you'll get your hands on them very very soon so these different devices have gotten smaller this is the Amazon echo dot it was the one most popular thing sold for Christmas last year they didn't release the official numbers but Jeff Bezos said Millions also interesting that the richest man in the world is putting so much work into voice user interfaces with the Amazon Alexa platform so this is where the technology is smart assistant companies claim that speech recognition software is now 4.9% word error rate and humans average around five point one percent so slowly technology is catching up to humans it's an exciting time to be thinking about voi design these are the major players right now in the smart assistant space now it's a whole new interface but generally what you see is things related to smart assistants because that's where the money is being put forward to develop and work on the UX so these are the the platforms the four platforms that are that are popular right now and what you'll see is all the smaller companies have found it easier to build on top of these platforms instead up to building their own platform and there are countless other as Samsung has one in Bixby obviously this will be a new platform much like OS was in the past ten years so this is how it works today if you were to design an app for one of these platforms you'd have a device say the iPhone the Google home or an Amazon echo you build some sort of app or skill and then it's powered by a cloud-based platform so these are kind of the three parts to designing the UI's today so this is a vegetable app that one of our career foundry employees made as testing out our course so you access this on the Amazon echo it accesses the skill which is also in the cloud and then uses the platform to make the app run so that's that's kind of how they're building out the future of the UI design much like smartphones it's being done through an app store so they're kind of outsourcing a job of UX design to companies who are building apps for Alexa and it's a great time to start to get into this because in a few years the smart assistant space alone so just smart assistants like echo and Google home those are going to be a three billion dollar industry but there's a few problems so I have an Amazon echo dot it falls a bit short in some some ways the interactions can feel a bit flat and this is why because right now this is this is sort of mediocre we're at command-and-control so you have to explicitly indicate when you want to speak by saying Alexa the conversation is closed with a beginning and end and you can get you can give a command at any time but you have to use the specific action and wake words so it works but it's a bit like tapping on an old-school phone what we want to get to which what I think will make it much more magical is conversational so users are not required to indicate when they want to talk they just talk like they normally would to another human there's longer back and forth so it can remember the interactions it can remember things you said and it just uses natural turn-taking asking question pauses which means it's more human in conversational so as of today no one has designed a voi that's conversational but you'll hear lots about it people talking about conversational UI some claiming it's already here but I think it's it's still a few more years away but what stands between us and conversational I think a lot of it is a big UX challenge if you look at touchscreen interfaces this is kind of following a similar path in the 90s there was this the first one of the first touchscreen phones was named Simon and it used the stylus and you had to tap specifically on the interface to get it to work and then ten years later along comes the iPhone and I don't know if you remember but one of the big things about the iPhone was you didn't need a stylus you could just use your fingers it was natural and so this is this is how things went from mediocre to magical with touchscreen interfaces and I hope the same thing will happen with voice interfaces so what will the iPhone of voice interfaces look like I don't know but I'm excited to see what that will be so now maybe you understand this device a little bit more I mean maybe what's possible I think one day we're gonna look at this thing and we're gonna say how archaic why was it so clunky and why did I have to bark orders to it why couldn't it just tell when I was having a bad day and soon I think that will start to improve on that so how many of you have used the Google home or an Amazon echo just play it around with one a few people so I think maybe you let a more chance in the future but if you look at these devices you can already start to see a little bit of the current problems with why they're not in every home so right now they're not in every home by any means if you look at this you see there's a little mute switch on the Amazon echo or the Google home Mini so they added this after they released it based on concerns that people were worried about something what if someone is listening so this is this is something I've heard a lot people worrying about potentially a company or maybe governing agency or all kinds of things with a microphone in their home look look at it like a UX problem so it's a conceptual model problem here I think the conceptual model is something like they think a bug a flat an apartment they think that then this microphone that's in their home is always on they think it's being recorded and actively listened to and there are no signifiers that someone is listening and I guess that's the point if you're in a spy movie you try and hide all the signifiers so this is I think what maybe people are thinking in the background but the reality is every one of you who has a smartphone you have two cameras in it you have a GPS unit and you have a microphone so not just it's not just bugging your home it's bugging your entire life if you're thinking of it like this so let's let's not get too freaked out by this this is just kind of some of the problems we're running to you today and these problems can be solved so I think we should be working on the UI interfaces just like everything else in a way that's safe designed ethically but still useful with a full functionality I don't think we get to decide if duis become a thing there's as you can see a lot of money being poured into these interfaces a lot of people willing to embrace them but I do think as designers we get to decide how they are designed so assuming we come over overcome those hurdles those ethical issues here's seven reasons why I think duis would be magical in the future first of all the visually impaired can take full advantage of today's tip so for the past ten years they've been missing out on the smartphone boom over 250 million people in America who are visually impaired today and around 80 percent of those people are 50 years or older so that's a huge market even just in one country of people who are willing to embrace this new interface and they can actually visually impaired people can hear around two or three times faster than regular people so you should understand that this is a superpower and you should design your voi accordingly to take advantage of this talking is faster than typing this seems a bit like a no-brainer but Stanford did a really great study on using a phone what's just faster tapping into your phone or dictating into your phone what they found I think obviously is that tapping talking to your phone was around three times faster than tapping and one of the main things about it that was that with the new text and speech recognition software it was way more accurate than tapping and I don't know if any of you have ever owned an Apple TV and used this nightmare UI but it's extremely frustrating and I think you'll start to see this is why a lot of people are adding to the remotes they're adding other little microphones they're adding a voi to things with a remote so voice is hands-free eyes-free and omnidirectional you can use the UI while you're cooking you don't have to alter your behavior in any way it doesn't require a whole lot of attention until you're actually giving a command and you doesn't require your eyes it can be placed in any part of your house and it still manages to do the job and that's going to be really helpful when you're designing experiences so vu is are also cheaper and smaller than touchscreens another one that you might think is pretty obvious but Apple's iPhone X is reportedly the most breakable iPhone ever costing around a thousand dollars imagine if you didn't have to worry about breaking that device if you look at a touchscreen it can go no smaller than two fingers with because what's the point of having a touchscreen that's smaller than a finger it's pretty much the same as a touchscreen the size of the finger so right now this is a thing you can buy on the market today it's advertised as the world's smallest headset imagine having all the knowledge of the human entire history inside your ear with a device like this that you can talk to you can give commands that it can help you out in your daily life I think you're starting to see that these kind of things are becoming a bit magical so the device can change but the UX remains the same and this is a really nice benefit of designing for vui so you saw this slide before the device the app and the platform if the device changes it doesn't really affect the experience so you can be using a microphone that's placed strategically you could use your phone you could use your device in your home and the experience remains the same you don't need to design multiple screens that work on multiple sizes you just designed the experience right now in our world we're a bit glued to our phones and with something like this with a v UI you may not even have to take your phone around with you in your pocket maybe you could do something like sign in to a service with your voice and it's just a little microphone so instead of having your thousand dollar iPhone X in your phone in your pocket worrying about losing it you could just speak into a $2 microphone speech conveys more meaning than text and this is the real magical thing about the UI design I don't know if you've ever had a text conversation with someone and it just sort of fell flat because all you have is text it's very difficult to convey emotion with things as simple as text and your technology it has the same problem as you so once you do something I want you to close your eyes with me right now so close your eyes relax your body listen to the sound of my voice so maybe there's a few things you can tell by just the sound of my voice maybe you can tell that I'm male relatively young maybe that English is my first language there's a lot of things you can tell if you listen very carefully okay open your eyes these are some of the things that you can tell when you hear a voice you can tell sometimes the age sometimes the gender regional background personality and even current emotional emotional state and which is really interesting because you know even sometimes when we talk you can hear that we're smiling so if I'm talking to you right now and I'm smiling there's a good chance the system who's listening that might think maybe there's some sarcasm involved here something that's evaded a lot of Technology before and finally our interactions with technology become more human so so sighs that interactions with technology might be a bit boring and they might be a little bit annoying and they might be downright dangerous but what happens as technology becomes a bit more human Google makes these really great ads where they try and show the power of their smart assistants but you ask the top thing is you ask a question to the device and the bottom this system replies and I thought that we were really great really clever ads so I decided to make a few of my own to show you what it might look like in the future when vui becomes magical so imagine a vui they could tell by the quality of your voice how you're feeling and adjust your schedule accordingly it has the power to remember all your past conversations so that it can give you the kind of advice that you need maybe it will become so good at human interactions that it could handle such complex things as depression with the UI design there's no need for onboarding because it comes naturally actually Amazon just released Amazon echo kids edition so that's something that's coming soon even after your eyes begin to stop working long into that period of your life your voice still symptom seems to work it's one way that you can interact with the world so to recap these were some of the things that I think will make DUIs magical in the next 5-10 years and I hope that that excites you a bit to forget to get involved in projects involving the UI design so who gets to create this future I think it's you guys I think UX designers are especially equipped to handle the UI design you know your deliverable is really more of a user flow to chart you don't have to get really good at you know software such as sketch or XD you're just working with diagrams and doing real UX problems career foundry offers a course on the UI design it's very hands-on project-based by a few weeks in the course you'll be designing your own skill for Amazon Alexa Amazon actually partnered with us to create this course and if you're interested in it come talk to me after I've even got a little bit of a discount for UX alive and we also offer other courses if you're interested in UX design and that sort of thing Thanks [Applause]

Channel: Userspots

Views: 4,994

Rating: 4.9139786 out of 5

Keywords: user experience, ux, ui, uxalive, careerfoundry, voice of ui

Id: QRNkD6O2vLA

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018