Useful materials on the design of voice interfaces

The future of voice interfaces is better than that of dust-covered bots. Sales of devices are growing vigorously, and major platforms are rapidly acquiring partnerships and integrations into everything connected to electricity and the Internet. By the end of the year, 100 million devices are predicted ; already 20% of American families have a smart column . Well, the domestic day-high supporters stood in line for Alice. Whether you were there or not, studying the topic is useful.


The main book - Designing Voice Interfaces from Cathy Pearl. She, by the way, manages the design of Google Assistant and recently described the main features of the design of voice interfaces .



Each major platform has guidelines for designing interfaces for them:

1. Amazon Alexa
2. Google Assistant
3. Microsoft Cortana
4. Apple Siri
5. Yandex Alice - no design guidelines yet, but there is general documentation

The Alexa ecosystem is best developed — it has enough tools and interesting experiments (the platform has more than 50% of the market). For example:

1. Online Storyline service to create skills.
2. Echoism for their testing.
3. Rafal Cymerys from Upside is showing the Alexa StarCraft II voice control experiment . It is well suited for operations involving a sequence of several primitive actions, although basic operations are still easier to do through the mouse and keyboard.
4. Enough voice games and quests like Jurassic World . There are interesting combinations with desktop . And even Skyrim is ironic .

A bunch of recent news and relevant statistics can be found on the Voicebot website. But just a couple of relatively fresh articles on the topic:

1. Several stand-up comedians appreciate the humor of the smart assistants Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. For example, Google has a separate team of writers who provide jokes.
2. Jacky Li from the Connected Lab has done some user research on how to control machine functions using a touch screen and voice . Touch screens obviously distract the driver. But voice control is not better either (the recent article by the Nielsen / Norman Group gives specific reasons ).
3. Memo Frederik Goossens on the design of voice interfaces .

This is just a small section of interesting and important pieces for the designer. Keep yourself informed, there is a chance that will soon come in handy.