Customer Reviews

Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship

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If you're designing voice user interfaces, you should buy this book.

The basic premise of the book is that when a computer has a voice--and it doesn't matter whether the voice is a recorded human or synthesized--people are going to subconsciously interact with the computer as if it is human (bringing their biases about gender, ethnicity, and personality).

I bought this book thinking I would skim it for ideas before writing a proposal. The proposal was focused on improving human-computer interaction for a communications device that uses voice (speech recognition) as the input and the output.

Well, I skimmed the first couple of chapters and realized that I really should read them more closely. I learned a couple of great nuggets on voice gender that influenced what I would include in the proposal.

Then I skimmed the next couple of chapters on personality of voices, realized I should read those more closely, learned a few more nuggets that I knew were going into the proposal.

At that point, I realized I needed to read the whole book closely and fast. Luckily, that was not a problem. The book is an easy read. Every chapter talks about an important design issue for voice user interfaces, describes the decisions that a designer could make, then outlines the research that was done, explains what was learned from the research, and discusses the implications of that research for how you should design your interface.

In short, this book completely changed the proposal, and I think we have a much better chance of winning the business. Furthermore, I have already identified about 5 major things we can do to improve our exsisting products that I did not know about before reading this book.

This is must reading for anyone in e-commerce marketing. The insight that can be gained from this book is amazing.