Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience
Fingers do not walk well on cell phones.
Bill Meisel, president of TMA Associate and the non-profit Applied Voice Input Output Society arranged the Voice Search Conference held in San Diego, California, March 10-12. One question posed there, according to Usability News, was Will Voice Search be THE Usability Breakthrough for Mobile Phones?
The dilemma according to Meisel is:
It’s not unusual for user interfaces to get “stuck” on one model. The layout of keyboards hasn’t changed for decades, for example, despite some efforts to make it easier to use (by putting oft-used letters under the strongest fingers). The telephone’s 12-button keypad is similarly persistent. Persistence of the user interface is a major barrier to increased use of mobile devices beyond communication.
He believes that “voice search” will come to dominate mobile phones. He has some powerful companies who share his view: just think Google, Microsoft and Nuance to name but three. This is an idea whose time has come.
Go To Top
BPWrap
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I just hope they can deal with accents. I wrote a post a while back about this here:
Voice recognition SMS
January 19th, 2009 at 5:05 am
The cell phone is basically meant for voice communications. Thus speech has got to be the most favourable form of input. Voice input search will go a long way in making mobile search more popular. But since many people are going to search for places when it comes to mobile searching, it has to be seen how the place name pronunciations are mapped.