It feels like yesterday, when in December 2008 I registered it with Companies House and became Company Director (with multiple hats).
My very first client project was for the NHS Business Authority on their EHIC Helpline (which hopefully will survive the Brexit negotiations). Back then, whenever I was telling anyone what my company does (VUI Design for Speech IVRs), I was greeted by blank stares of confusion or incomprehension. It did feel a bit lonely at times!
Many more clients and thousands of long hours, long days and working weekends since, here we are in December 2019 and I suddenly find myself surrounded by VUI Designers and Voice Strategists who have now seen the potential and inescapable nature of speech interfaces and have followed on my footsteps. I feel vindicated, especially since I started in Voice back in 1996 with my Post-Doc in Spoken Dialogue Management at the University of Erlangen! 😎 (Yet another thing I’m hugely grateful to the EU for!)
We started with Voice-First VUI Design back in 1996, well before Samsung’s BIXBY (2017), Google’s ASSISTANT (2016), Amazon’s ALEXA (2014), Apple’s SIRI (2010) and even before the world started using GOOGLE for internet searches (1998)!
It’s quite frustrating when I realise that many of these newcomers have never heard of an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system before, but they will eventually learn. 🤓 In the past 25 years it was the developers who insisted could design conversational interfaces without any (Computational) Linguistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Speech Recognition (ASR) background and didn’t need, therefore, a VUI Designer. And we were an allegedly superfluous luxury and rarity in those times. In the past couple of years it’s the shiny Marketing people, who make a living from their language mastery, and the edgy GUI Designers, who excell in visual design and think they can design voice interfaces too, but still know nothing about NLP or ASR.
What they don’t know is that, by modifying, for instance, just the wording of what your system says (prompt tuning), you can achieve dramatically better speech recognition and NLU accuracy, because the user is covertly “guided” to say what we expect (and have covered in the grammar). The same holds for tuned grammars (for out-of-vocabulary words), word pronunciations (for local and foreign accents), tuned VUI designs (for error recovery strategies) and tuned ASR engine parameters (for timeouts and barge-ins). It’s all about knowing how the ASR software and our human brain language software works.
Excited to see what the next decade is going to bring for DialogCONNECTION and the next quarter of a century for Voice! Stay tuned!
I was really interested to read the BDVA – Big Data Value Association‘s and euRobotics‘ recent report on “Strategic
Research, Innovation and Deployment Agenda for an AI PPP: A focal point
for collaboration on Artificial Intelligence, Data and Robotics“, which you can find here.
Of particular relevance to me was the Section on Physical and Human Action and Interaction
(pp. 39-41), which describes the dependencies, challenges and expected
outcome of coordinated action on NLP, NLU and multimodal dialogue
processing. The associated challenges are:
Natural interaction in unstructured contexts, which is the default in the case of voice assistants for instance, as they are expected to hold a conversation on any of a range of different topics and act on them
Improved natural language understanding, interaction and dialogue covering all European languages and age ranges, thus shifting the focus from isolated recognition to the interpretation of the semantic and cultural context, and the user intention
Development of verbal and non-verbal interaction models for people and machines, underlining the importance of gestures and emotion recognition and generation (and not only in embodied artificial agents)
Co-development of technology and regulation to assure safe interaction in safety-critical and unstructured environments, as the only way to assure trust and, hence, widespread citizen and customer adoption
The development of confidence measures for interaction and the interpretation of actions, leading to explanable AI and, hence, improved and more reliable decision-making
You can find the excellent and very comprehensive report here.
I recently attended The Association for Conversational Interaction Design (ACIXD) Brown bag “Challenges of Implementing Voice Control for Space Applications” presented by the NASA Authority in the field, George Salazar. George Salazar is Human Computing Interface Technical Discipline Lead at NASA with over 30 years of experience and innovation in Space applications. Among a long list of achievements, he was involved in the development of the International Space Station internal audio system and has been awarded several awards, including a John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award, a NASA Silver Achievement Medal and a Lifetime Achievement Award for his service and commitment to STEM. His acceptance speech for that last one brought tears to my eyes! An incredibly knowledgeable and experienced man with astounding modesty and willingness to pass his knowledge and passion to younger generations.
George Salazar’s Acceptance Speech
Back to Voice Recognition.
Mr Salazar explained how space missions slowly migrated over the years from ground control (with dozens of engineers involved) to vehicle control and from just 50 to 100s of buttons. This put the onus of operating all those buttons to the 4-5 person space crew, which in turn brought in speech recognition as an invaluable interface that would make good sense in such a complex environment.
Screenshot from George Salazar’s ACIxD presentation
Factors affecting ASR accuracy in Space
He described how they have tested different Speech Recognition (ASR) software to see which fared the best, both speaker-independent and speaker-dependent. As he noted, they all claim 99% accuracy officially but that is never the case in practice! He listed many factors that affect recognition accuracy, including:
background noise (speaker vs background signal separation)
multiple speakers speaking simultaneously (esp. in such a noisy environment)
intraspeaker speech variation due to psychological factors (as being in space can, apparently, make you depressed, which in turn affects your voice!), but presumably also to physiological factors (e.g. just having a cold)
Astronaut gender (low pitch in males vs high pitch in females): ASR software was designed for males, so male astronauts always had better error rates!
The effects of microgravity (physiological effects) on the voice quality, as already observed on the first flight (using templates from ground testing as the baseline), are impossible to separate from the environment and crew stress and can lead to a 10-30% error increase!
Screenshot from George Salazar’s ACIxD presentation
Even radiation can affect the ASR software, but also the hardware (computing power). As a comparison, AMAZON Alexa uses huge computer farms, whereas in Space they rely on slow “radiation-hardened” processors: they can handle the radiation, but are actually 5-10 times slower than commercial processors!
Screenshot from George Salazar’s ACIxD presentation
Solutions to Space Challenges
To counter all these negative factors, a few different approaches and methodologies have been employed:
on-orbit retrain capability: rendering the system adaptive to changes in voice and background noise, resulting in up to 100% accuracy
macro-commanding: creating shortcuts to more complex commands
redundacy as fallback (i.e. pressing a button as a second modality)
Screenshot from George Salazar’s ACIxD presentation
Critical considerations
One of the challenges that Mr Salazar mentioned in improving ASR accuracy is overadaptation or skewing the system to a single astronaut.
In addition, he mentioned the importance of Dialog Design in NASA’s human-centered design (HCD) Development approach. The astronauts should always be able to provide feedback to the system, particularly for error correction (Confusability leads to misrecognitions).
Screenshot from George Salazar’s ACIxD presentation
Screenshot from George Salazar’s ACIxD presentation
In closing, Mr Salazar stressed that speech recognition for Command and Control in Space applications is viable, especially in the context of a small crew navigating a complex habitat.
Moreover, he underlined the importance of trust that the ASR system needs to inspire in its users, as in this case the astronauts may literally be placing their lives onto its performance and accuracy.
Screenshot from George Salazar’s ACIxD presentation
Q & A
After Mr Salazar’s presentation, I couldn’t help but pose a couple of questions to him, given that I consider myself to be a Space junkie (and not in the sci-fi franchise sense either!).
So, I asked him to give us a few examples of the type of astronaut utterances and commands that their ASR needs to be able to recognise. Below are some such phrases:
zoom in, zoom out
tilt up, tilt down
pan left
please repeat
and their synonyms. He also mentioned the case of one astronaut who kept saying “Wow!” (How do you deal with that!)
I asked whether the system ever had to deal with ambiguity in trying to determine which component to tilt, pan or zoom. He answered that, although they do carry out plenty of confusability studies, the context is quite deterministic: the astronaut selects the monitor by going to the monitor section and speaking the associated command. Thus, there is no real ambiguity as such.
Screenshot from George Salazar’s ACIxD presentation
My second question to Mr Salazar was about the type of ASR they have gone for. I understood that the vocabulary is small and contained / unambiguous, but wasn’t sure whether they went for speaker-dependent or speaker-independent recognition in the end. He replied that the standard now is speaker-independent ASR, which however has been adapted to a small group of astronauts (i.e. “group-dependent“). Hence, all the challenges of distinguishing between different speakers with different pitch and accents, all against the background noise and the radiation and microgravity effects! They must be really busy!
It was a great pleasure to listen to the talk and an incredible and rare honour to get to speak with such an awe-inspiring pioneer in Space Engineering!
This week I bumped into Echodadand “the world’s harshest critics of Alexa skills“, i.e. his 2 kids. Hat tip for the idea by the way!! 😀
I read with particular interest his Medium post on “How Voice Interfaces are infiltrating society and changing our children“, a mockingly deceptive title for a list of witty repartees to all the usual arguments against Voice Assistants and speech interfaces being used by children. Highly enjoyable! 🙂
He addresses the perennial argument about children unlearning good manners, when they interact with VAs too much, and talks about his own experience with his kids assuring us that, actually, children know the difference between a human and a Voice Assistant. Phew, so there is no need to panic that they are going to suddenly be more and more rude to their teachers and grandparents and, hence, no need to reprogram voice interfaces to insist on “Pleases” and “Thank-yous” (Phew, again). I am fully in agreement there.
Similarly, he discusses the argument that children unlearn the importance and necessity of patience in the face of inescapable delays and life’s frustrations, when they can’t instantly get what they want (an answer to an obscure question about the animal kingdom or their favourite YouTube video). This seasoned dad knows that patience is something all kids have always struggled with and have to continually practise at that age. It is part of learning and growing up. And I can attest to that, too. (Oh the tantrums!)
Echodad & “the world’s harshest critics of Alexa skills”
However, in contrast to him, I am not at all comfortable or happy with the idea that my kid would go straight to Alexa or Google or Bixby for an answer to his Space or Transport questions and not even bother approach me. I may well take recourse to voice search myself for the answer, but I want to be the Gatekeeper to the Information Castle and not a passive bystander in his quests for knowledge. At least that’s what I consider as one of my – traditional – roles as a parent and I would like him to think that way too, at least until he is older. And it’s not just a hunch: having studied Psycholinguistics and Child Developmental Psychology at University in an earlier life (last century though!), I know the paramount importance of parental input, continuous feedback and playful interaction in the child’s quality and rate of learning anything, but particularly language.
In this respect, Voice Assistants, Voicebots, Chatbots and Voice Search itself have changed parent-child roles and interaction forever, and neither I nor many people can predict the long-term effect of this societal development. Kids are already and will become more and more independent, for sure, and that is not a negative thing in itself, but will that at the same time make me – as a parent – less dependable and approachable? Will he automatically assume I’m lacking in encyclopaedic knowledge and he that lessen his respect for me? And will the kid get the same quantity and quality of validation cues from Alexa or Google Assistant, as he would have got of me? More soberingly, will it teach kids that they don’t need to rely on or even invest much in relationships with people, because interacting with technology is easier, more fun and safer and more efficient? It’s not just the relationship to the parents we should be worried about, but all other family, work, peer and romantic relationships as well.
I am all for the use of voice interfaces and spoken dialogue systems by adults, e.g. myself, naturally, and my own clients; VUIs have been my bread and butter for decades! Nonetheless, at the risk of sounding like a regressive technophobe, I am vehemently against its use by children and will keep mine shielded for as long as I can manage! It’s already hard to keep him from doing a regular Google voice search for “pictures for buses” (sic). 🤔 😅
I recently read a very interesting article in Fast Company, which resonated a lot with me. Entitled “It’s time to rethink voice assistants completely“, it addresses a common obsession with designing voice interfaces that could easily be mistaken for humans.
It undoubtedly seems like a very noble goal, given that humans are at the apex of the communication pyramid among other living beings (let alone inorganic material!). However, the article makes the case, which I fully support, that human-like is not always desirable or even appropriate, especially if it fools you into thinking you are interacting with another human. This is a particularly poignant faux-pas, if the user did indeed believe the dialogue bot, only to be then frustrated by its lack of understanding or the lack of rationale in its response.
As the article suggests, human conversations should, of course, be studied thoroughly, but only be taken as inspiration for VUI and Voice Design, and not as the gold standard of interaction.
In fact, a disruptive idea is put forward, to consider Voice Assistants to be “performers, rather than human-like conversationalists”. That is precisely how you can create and craft more expressive, emotional, engaging and sticky conversational interfaces and the corresponding conversation designs.
In 2018, a new book on “Voice First” came out on Amazon and I was proud and deeply honoured, as it includes one of my articles! Now it has come out on Kindle as an e-Book and we are even more excited at the prospect of a much wider reach!
“Ubiquitous Voice: Essays from the Field”: Thoughts, insights and anecdotes on Speech Recognition, Voice User Interfaces, Voice Assistants, Conversational Intelligence, VUI Design, Voice UX issues, solutions, Best practices and visions from the veterans!
I have been part of this effort since its inception, working alongside some of the pioneers in the field who now represent the Market Leaders (GOOGLE, AMAZON, NUANCE, SAMSUNG VIV .. ). Excellent job by our tireless and intrepid Editor, Lisa Falkson!
My contribution “Convenience + Security = Trust: Do you trust your Intelligent Assistant?” is on data privacy concerns and social issues associated with the widespread adoption of voice activation. It is thus platform-, ASR-, vendor- and company-agnostic.
You can get the physical bookhere and the Kindle versionhere.
I just listened to the latest Google Cloud Platform podcast with Google’s own Cathy Pearl and was delighted (and vindicated!) to hear her stress the importance of DESIGNING your conversational interface before CODING it. You really need to think hard about the user needs you’re trying to meet with the interface and the possible dialogue “scripts” that would help you do that. Only then should you bother start coming up with training phrases for your intents or actions. This will save you a lot of headaches, time and, actually, face among your customers too. I’ve seen so many instances myself of developers seeing VUI Design and Voice UX design as an afterthought and then wonder why their conversational interface is not conversational at all or indeed much of an interface to the intended data and services, as it doesn’t always respond appropriately to what the customer wants or even to what they say.
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