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Speech and Hands-free interaction: myths, challenges, and opportunities

Published: 04 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

HCI research has for long been dedicated to better and more naturally facilitating information transfer between humans and machines. Unfortunately, humans' most natural form of communication, speech, is also one of the most difficult modalities to be understood by machines - despite, and perhaps, because it is the highest-bandwidth communication channel we possess. While significant research efforts, from engineering, to linguistic, and to cognitive sciences, have been spent on improving machines' ability to understand speech, the MobileHCI community (and the HCI field at large) has been relatively timid in embracing this modality as a central focus of research. This can be attributed in part to the unexpected variations in error rates when processing speech, in contrast with often-unfounded claims of success from industry, but also to the intrinsic difficulty of designing and especially evaluating speech and natural language interfaces. As such, the development of interactive speech-based systems is mostly driven by engineering efforts to improve such systems with respect to largely arbitrary performance metrics. Such developments have often been void of any user-centered design principles or consideration for usability or usefulness.
The goal of this course is to inform the MobileHCI community of the current state of speech and natural language research, to dispel some of the myths surrounding speech-based interaction, as well as to provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to learn more about how speech recognition and speech synthesis work, what are their limitations, and how they could be used to enhance current interaction paradigms. Through this, we hope that HCI researchers and practitioners will learn how to combine recent advances in speech processing with user-centred principles in designing more usable and useful speech-based interactive systems.

Cited By

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  • (2018)Virtual assistants for mobile interactionProceedings of the 30th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/3292147.3292232(568-571)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2018
  • (2018)Design guidelines for hands-free speech interactionProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct10.1145/3236112.3236149(269-276)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018

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cover image ACM Conferences
MobileHCI '17: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
September 2017
874 pages
ISBN:9781450350754
DOI:10.1145/3098279
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 04 September 2017

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MobileHCI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 45 of 224 submissions, 20%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 202 of 906 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Virtual assistants for mobile interactionProceedings of the 30th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/3292147.3292232(568-571)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2018
  • (2018)Design guidelines for hands-free speech interactionProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct10.1145/3236112.3236149(269-276)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018

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