Customer Reviews

Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

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Some things in this book are very useful, notably the interviews. However, this book is fairly out-of-date, and doesn't reflect the state of the art for speech recognition technology. The section on linguistics is wrong more often than right, and wouldn't add much to the reader's understanding of designing speech interfaces even if the errors were corrected. While I think that the authors' knowledge of user interface design, in general, is solid, their experience with speech is less so. For example, in the interview with Kate Dobroth (which is really the highlight of the book for me) the authors/editors consistenly transcribe the term "n-best" as "end best" pointing to the authors' inexperience with the technology.

This books provides some great ideas of where and how to get started with Speech Interfaces. I found the interviews to be very helpful. The people interviewed within the book share great insights and ideas as to where they see speech technology going in the future. The technology discussed in the book is low cost, and in my opinion, not very high tech. There are better solutions which can handle more robust speech applications, none of which were mentioned here.