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What is Voice Search?

Just say what you want.

Voice Search makes today’s services and products more usable, particularly when accessing those services with smaller portable devices. One can simply say what one wants, much like talking to a personal assistant, and have any ambiguity resolved by a quick dialog or a display of alternative results.

The maturity of today’s speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis technologies make a user-friendly voice interface possible. If one is searching audio sources, the same general principle applies—find what you want by just typing appropriate search terms or have the software analyze many audio files for content and summarize the results.

Quick search
The guiding principle of voice search is to avoid complex and confusing navigation, to provide a shortcut to what the user wants. Web search has become popular on PCs by embracing this apparently simple philosophy. The Voice Search conference explores the many dimensions of a fundamentally different approach to making systems and services usable and making wireless phones and other mobile devices an acceptable platform for marketing.

Voice and visual approaches work together
The WIMP interface (Window, Icon, Menu, and Pointing device)—the familiar Graphical User Interface—has proved effective on PCs and in Web browsers. The most powerful aspect of WIMP is its familiarity—one can usually find some feature or data eventually by navigating through windows or pages of information. “Eventually” and “usually” are increasingly becoming the operant words, however, as the number of features and the amount of information we encounter grow exponentially. Nevertheless, a WIMP interface complements speech, allowing data to be delivered as text or graphically, and providing a fallback solution when the environment is not conducive to speaking.

On a small device, the limitations of the WIMP approach make it a poor solution as a primary user interface. The small screen is more like a porthole than a window. The device must be held, so text entry and pointing require at least two hands.

The Voice Search philosophy is an alternative, and can serve as the primary model for the user. If you can’t talk, type what you would say.

Wireless connectivity and voice search
Voice search can be particularly effective on connected devices, since it can take advantage of network-based speech technology and data resources. Any device with a data connection and a microphone can use network-based speech recognition—it need not be a cellphone.

Why this conference?