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

Interfaces that talk and listen are populating computers, cars, call centers, and even home appliances and toys, but voice interfaces invariably frustrate rather than help. In Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave reveal how interactive voice technologies can readily and effectively tap into the automatic responses all speech — whether from human or machine — evokes.

Wired for Speech demonstrates that people are "voice-activated": we respond to voice technologies as we respond to actual people and behave as we would in any social situation. By leveraging this powerful finding, voice interfaces can truly emerge as the next frontier for efficient,user-friendly technology.Wired for Speech presents new theories and experiments and applies them to critical issues concerning how people interact with technology-based voices. It considers how people respond to a female voice in e-commerce (does stereotyping matter?), how a car's voice can promote safer driving (are "happy" cars better cars?), whether synthetic voices have personality and emotion (is sounding like a person always good?), whether an automated call center should apologize when it cannot understand a spoken request ("To Err is Interface; To Blame, Complex"), and much more. Nass and Brave's deep understanding of both social science and design, drawn from ten years of research at Nass's Stanford laboratory, produces results that often challenge conventional wisdom and common design practices. These insights will help designers and marketers build better interfaces,scientists construct better theories, and everyone gain better understandings of the future of the machines that speak with us.

How interactive voice-based technology can tap into the automatic and powerful responses all speech—whether from human or machine—evokes.

Library Journal

Until recently, interfaces that talk and listen were found only in literature, comics, and film. Speech is now being used to interact with electronic systems in cars, telephone switchboards, home appliances, toys, word processors, and commercial kiosks to free people from the ubiquitous computing universe of windows, icons, menus, keypads, and pointers. Drawing on a decade of research collaboration between industry and Stanford University's CHIMe (Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media) Lab, Nass (communication, Stanford Univ.; The Media Equation) and postdoctoral scholar Brave (communication, Stanford Univ.) explore the social and technological challenge of designing interactive voice technologies that mimic human speech communication, both verbal and nonverbal. Practical psychological and behavioral questions are explored from both a research and an interface design standpoint, and subjects include gender, sex, personality, accents, race, ethnicity, emotion, facial cues, realism, and error rates. Balancing stylistically between a scholarly review of a hot disciplinary topic and a Kurzweil-like future technology tome, this exploration of the promise and difficulty of embedding speech, the most social of all communications, speech, into everyday technologies will be best appreciated by interface designers, scientists, scholars, and more sophisticated readers of popular science. For larger public and academic libraries.-James A. Buczynski, Seneca Coll. of Applied Arts & Technology, Toronto Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Clifford Nass is Professor, Department of Communication, and Codirector, Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory, at Stanford University. He is the author of The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places.

Scott Brave is Chief Technology Officer at Baynote, Inc.