Developing Voice-only Applications in the Absence of Speech Recognition Technology

In this paper, we describe an information access system with a voice-only interface. We outline a design process for generating guidelines for voice-only interaction in the absence of adequate speech recognition technology. Our usability studies make use of a "Wizard of Oz" scheme to replace the missing core technology

Supporting collaboration in early concept exploration : "a flock of fishes"

M.S.Jay D. Bolte

Collaboration during Conceptual Design

Conceptual design involves requirements analysis, functional specification, and architectural design. It remains informal and poorly understood. We studied the conceptual design activities of a representative industrial software project, Centauri, for three months with follow-up observations and discussions over the following six months. Our goal was to understand how patterns of collaboration and communication in project teams affect the convergence of the project on a common vision and a documented specification. In this paper, we present our research methodology, our findings, and their implications for process and tool support. The following observations stand out. First, convergence on a common system vision was painfully slow. The major impediment to faster progress was the difficulty that the project team had in making critical allocation and interface design decisions. Second, Centauri project members repeatedly raised certain issues and failed to reach closure on key problems. Finally, we observed a persistent tension between the desire on behalf of nearly all project members to follow a proceduralized development process and the urgency of delivering a working product

Characterizing Browsing Behaviors on the World-Wide Web

This paper presents the results of a study conducted at Georgia Institute of Technology that captured client-side user events of NCSA's X Mosaic. Actual user behavior, as determined from client-side log file analysis, supplemented our understanding of user navigation strategies as well as provided real interface usage data. Log file analysis also yielded design and usability suggestions for WWW pages, sites and browsers. The methodology of the study and findings are discussed along with future research directions

Developing Voice-only Applications in the Absence of Speech Recognition Technology

In this paper, we describe an information access system with a voice-only interface. We outline a design process for generating guidelines for voice-only interaction in the absence of adequate speech recognition technology. Our usability studies make use of a "Wizard of Oz" scheme to replace the missing core technology. Keywords Voice-only interaction, speech recognition, Wizard of Oz INTRODUCTION Voice recognition and synthesis provide interesting and exciting interface alternatives for application developers. To date, voice has been used primarily to augment applications with an existing visual interface (e.g., VoiceNotes [6]). There are a couple of reasons why a voice-only interface to a system might be desirable. First, the application might require a hands-free mode of interaction. Second, telephone service is one of the few truly robust and ubiquitous network technologies, so it makes sense to extend information services away from the desktop by providing a telephone interfac..