Can VUI and GUI Survive an Interface Marriage?
Further Potential
Looking ahead, Dahl maintains that the potential for getting VUI and GUI together will be big for functions such as shopping apps, to help people make purchases. Another multimodal opportunity could be in customer care.
"In the customer care area, there's huge potential, because pure VUI applications, which are by far the most popular voice applications, are so hard to design because they don't have feedback, which you can easily have on a mobile phone," she says. "The only feedback that you can have in a VUI application is if a system can tell you that it didn't understand you. That's very slow and tedious, and I don't think it's very popular with customers."
There are many possibilities for multimodal solutions, but industry experts again caution that the needs of the consumer should be first and foremost. Keep in mind that customers use multimodality everywhere from the office to the park to the grocery store.
"It's different if you're looking for a movie than [if you're] checking into the healthcare plan you just enrolled in," Lloyd says. "I don't think you'd want to be speaking or hearing something about that through the speaker of your mobile device. Don't get blindsided by the coolness and the look [of the interface]. Step back and think about the customers' goals and how you need to help them accomplish [them]."
The Outlook Ahead
Moving forward, Dahl says there are some signs of additional progress, which are coming in the form of standards that the W3C is helping to develop.
"One standard is for communicating what we call modality components, like the speech recognition component, the graphical interface, and the text-to-speech with an interaction manager," she says. "We have different standards for how these components can communicate with each other, and I think that these [components] would make deployments a lot easier."
With industry groups and vendors both searching for a solution to get VUI and GUI designers on the same page, the future holds hope.
"The secret sauce will be in the consistency," says Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research. "GUIs and VUIs are being made part and parcel of natural user interfaces. The key attributes are that each individual will determine when, how, and by what means they want to interact with devices or services. Application designers must offer the same responses to requests, whether they're typed into a search box or said into a device's microphone."
Mazin Gilbert, assistant vice president of technical research at AT&T Labs, says that design barriers will be lowered in the near future as standards in mobility platforms and interfaces, cloud technology, and Web service tools become more widespread.
"We also expect visual modalities to play a stronger role with VUI and GUI," Gilbert says. "Your face, your body, and background provide information that can be used for various services. Combining face recognition and speech recognition, for example, can provide stronger authentication for security and personalized services. We are embarking into a very exciting world where everything will be connected. This will enable breakthroughs in multimodal services that have never been imagined before."
Staff Writer Michele Masterson can be reached at mmasterson@infotoday.com.
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