The Elements of Voice First Style. A Practical Guide to Voice User Interface Design 197742

If you're a new or experienced designer of conversational voice first experiences, this handy reference provides actionable answers to key aspects of eyes-busy, hands-busy, voice-only user interfaces. Designed as a companion to books about conversational voice design, this guide includes important details regarding eyes-free, hands-free, voice-only interfaces delivered by Amazon Echo, Google Nest, and a variety of in-car experiences.

Authors Ahmed Bouzid and Weiye Ma provide far-field voice best practices and recommendations in a manner similar to The Elements of Style, the popular American English writing style guide. Like that book, The Elements of Voice First Style provides direct, succinct explanations that focus on the essence of each topic. You'll find answers quickly without having to spend time searching through other sources.

With this guide, you'll be able to:

• Craft just the right language to enable your voicebot to effectively communicate with humans
• Create conversational voice interfaces that are robust enough to handle errors and failures
• Design highly usable conversational voice interfaces by paying attention to small details that can make or break the experience
• Build a design for a voice-only smart speaker that doesn't require customers to use their eyes or hands

Who Should Read This Book?

The target readers of this book are budding and practicing voicebot designers in the newly emerging technology space of far-field voice, as delivered by platforms such as Amazon Echo and Google Assistant, and hearable/speakable technologies, such as Apple’s AirPods. The book can also be useful for those who design IVR systems, but only to the extent that those systems are used eyes-free and hands-free.While this book is meant primarily to help voicebot designers think through and make sound design decisions, we have written the book explicitly to be highly readable and jargon-free so that it is also accessible to those colleagues who work with a designer: user experience (UX) researchers, product managers, developers, testers, marketers, and business development professionals.

Dr. Ahmed Bouzid is Founder and CEO of Witlingo, a McLean, Virginia, based startup that builds products and solutions to help brands establish and grow their Voice and Social Audio presence. Prior to Witlingo, Dr. Bouzid was Head of Echo Smart Home Product at Amazon and VP of Product and Innovation at Genesys. Dr. Bouzid is an Ambassador at the Open Voice Network and Advisor for The Human Language Technology Group at Georgetown University. Dr. Bouzid holds 12 patents in the Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing field and was recognized as a Speech Luminary by Speech Technology Magazine.

Dr. Weiye Ma obtained her PhD in Speech Processing and Recognition from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and has been practicing professionally in the Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis and Human Language Technology fields for more than 20 years. She has held several technical leadership roles in Unisys, Schneider Electric, Convergys, and is now Lead Speech Scientist at the MITRE Corporation.