UXPA Boston Conference 2015

With the explosion of devices in the wearable market, speech provides a real solution to the challenge around interaction methods on varying devices. Although not yet present, speech has the power to become a standard as it offers intuitive capabilities and hands free control across different form factors. Just like the devices themselves, the optimal speech interaction will have varying feature support based on the form factor, functions, and capabilities.  

How do we design optimal voice interactions across all of these unique devices such as hardware built into t-shirts, soles of sneakers, jewelry, glasses, watches and more? Maybe it makes sense for your watch to announce an incoming text message but it might be quite odd to hear that same message coming from your buddy’s belt. Or maybe your t-shirt knows that you’re running and thus triggers a more verbose dialog to reflect an eyes-free environment. Leveraging the environmental, location, and contextual information that these very personal devices often provide is one really powerful way to design smart, flexible speech interactions.

Designing to adjust to form factors, situations and sensory data leverages  speech as part of a potentially rich ecosystem of modalities that wearables can employ. For instance, sometimes you will want to design for speech as an input method, but rely on other output modalities - show understanding by simply taking action or perhaps by notifying a user with a tactile vibration response. Again, the entire interaction should be shaped with respect to the wearable itself.

In this talk, we’ll discuss how to design speech experiences in the wide variety of contexts that wearables bring to the table. We’ll provide examples and learnings around some fundamental themes in speech design: discoverability, guidance, personalization, and awareness of / integration with context and data.