Experiences: Voice User Interfaces

Both Web and mobile innovations are progressing at an incredible rate, making any lack in these essential technologies a critical issue for any company. As long as a decade ago, a poorly optimized Web site could lead to your losing traffic and revenues. Today, businesses cannot afford to ignore technology trends. Don’t let your business fall behind the technology curve.

Creating voice user interfaces (VUIs) for mobile apps is the hottest trend right now—and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Voice is a natural user interface. Some leading brands have already boosted awareness of their mobile apps and increased customer engagement by adding voice capabilities that are powered by existing VUI platforms. For example, Snapchat has launched an in-app voice assistant that is based on SoundHound, which lets users trigger filters with voice commands, immediately improving user engagement and loyalty. Pretty soon, users won’t just appreciate the greater functionality and friendliness of a voice-powered mobile app, they’ll expect it. Read More

What will be the voice-technology winner of tomorrow—voice-first or multimodal user interfaces? Those working in the voice user-experience sector are avidly discussing this hot topic—and UX researchers, UX designers, developers, marketers, and entrepreneurs may find it of interest as well.

In this article, I’ll define the terms voice first and multimodal, using current products as examples, explore some use cases and rationales for different types of user interfaces, consider contemporary research, and conceptualize the future of voice user interfaces. Should you keep your product’s visual features? Yes, because, ultimately, voice-enabled, multimodal user interfaces will be the preferred user experience. Read More

Many brands have explored voice user interfaces (VUIs) by creating some kind of skill for a smart speaker. While that’s a good start, it’s not the optimal way of leveraging voice capabilities for the future.

Instead, you should add voice to your existing apps to complement their current touch user interface. Early adopters such as Spotify have taken this approach and have received universal praise for their voice functionality. Spotify users can keep on using the app just as they’ve always used it, with its traditional touch user interface. Plus, they can use voice commands to control the media player. This is how you should use voice.

Rather than creating VUIs as replacements for your applications’ current user interfaces—as for Google Home or Alexa—create voice capabilities that provide a complementary user-interaction modality for your current user interface. Read More