Time Is on Your Side: Wearables Spell Opportunity for Speech Interface Designers

By the Numbers

Market figures back this up. In a March report, IDC forecasted that the global wearables market will see 45.7 million units shipped this year, up 133.4 percent from the 19.6 million units shipped in 2014. IDC also takes a bullish long view: Analysts project that by 2019, total shipment volumes will be 126.1 million units, translating into a five-year compound annual growth rate of 45.1 percent.

Focusing solely on the smart watch segment of wearables, researchers at the Smartwatch Group maintain that in 2014, 6.8 million smart watches were sold by 89 companies in 18 countries.

"Considering that around 140 additional companies are currently working on smart watch offerings, this number will grow substantially in 2015," said Pascal Koenig, managing partner of Smartwatch Group, in a statement. "But it is not only the number of active companies; it is also the much increased depth of the offerings of individual companies: many of them already offer second- and third-generation smart watches that are getting better and better from a hardware perspective.

"While there is still room for improvement on the design side, the gap to conventional watches will be closed in the years to come. The real challenge for the smart watch industry is to establish valuable use cases," Koenig said. "Many companies and around 100,000 app developers around the world are working on this."

Who are the people wearing smart watches? Many are young, well-to-do hipsters, according to a 2014 report from Nielsen. The company's research found that 48 percent of owners were 18 to 34 years old, with male and female smart watch wearers evenly split. They are tech-savvy—75 percent considered themselves early technology adopters. Nielsen also found that 29 percent stated that they made more than $100,000 a year.

You Don't Need Everything and the Kitchen Sink

When it comes to smart watch displays, the obvious concern is a tiny screen. With such a small amount of real estate, how do you decide what goes on it, what can be left off, and what’s most important among a wide array of applications?

"You can't get all the functionality of a smartphone squeezed into a watch," says K. W. "Bill" Scholz, president of the Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and president of NewSpeech. "Therefore, the watches designed by Apple and other companies all depend on the use of … near-field communication to a smartphone," via Bluetooth.

Scholz also stresses that designers need to consider how they can compensate for the lack of screen size. "If you have a big screen, it's easy to point or click on many things to select different options," he says. "But if you don't have that capability—if you have a tiny screen—then the software designer has to find some other techniques in order to adequately communicate between the user and the watch."

You don't want to hit smart watch wearers with the entire kitchen sink. It's not about the quantity of choices, but simply how to sort through those that exist. This is where a natural language mechanism can help.

Llamas agrees. "The first knee-jerk reactions that I think developers have—and this is unfortunate—is that they're going to shoehorn their current application for wearable devices from what they've done [before] on smartphones and tablets," he says.

"This simply cannot happen. We saw that problem twelve years ago when people started taking desktop and Internet applications and said, 'We're just going to shrink it down for smartphones.' It just did not work. It was an abject failure."

A better way of thinking about designing smart watch displays is to ask this question: What is the most important information that should surface to the top?