{"id":12194,"date":"2017-03-22T20:49:45","date_gmt":"2017-03-22T20:49:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=12194"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:58:01","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:58:01","slug":"benefits-of-voice-ui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/benefits-of-voice-ui\/","title":{"rendered":"What voice UI is good for (and what it isn’t)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Voice is either a genius technology whose time has finally come, or the most overhyped waste of time we\u2019ve seen since bots, blockchain, or winding back the clock, gamification.<\/p>\n

The reality is less dramatic, more nuanced. There is now a new broadly available input\/output interface to use and design for, and the most useful thing product and design folk can do is learn when and how that matters.<\/p>\n

The end of the beginning<\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

The recent emergence of Alexa, Siri, Cortana and “Okay Google” doesn\u2019t mean voice has “finally” arrived. Quite the opposite, it means we\u2019re finally getting going. The phase of concept demos, hype-cycles, and over-promising has ended. From here onwards, it\u2019s real technology supporting real use cases, or pack up and go home.<\/p>\n

There is a famed “long nose” of innovation that every significant new technology must pass through. Bill Buxton<\/a>, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, has lived through every new UI form and estimates that it takes 30 years from “research project” through to full maturity (defined as generating as being a billion dollar business).<\/p>\n

So these things will take a while, and when they arrive we shouldn\u2019t expect them to conquer every existing input mechanism, they complement them.<\/p>\n

Replacement is rare<\/h2>\n

\"New
\nNew input devices don\u2019t kill their predecessors, they stack on top of them. Voice won\u2019t kill touchscreens. Touchscreens didn\u2019t kill the mouse. The mouse didn\u2019t kill the command line. Analysts yearn for a simple narrative where the birth of every new technology instantly heralds the death of the previous one, but interfaces are inherently multimodal. The more the merrier. Every new technology starts in a new underserved niche and slowly expands until it finds all the areas it\u2019s best suited for. And voice has a great niche to start in…<\/p>\n

Placeonas<\/h2>\n

\"How
\nBill Buxton introduced the concept of a \u201cplace-ona\u201d, adapting the concept of a persona (which we all love to hate<\/a>) to show how a location can place limits on the type of interactions that makes sense. There is no \u201cone best input\u201d or \u201cone best output\u201d. It all depends on where you are, which in turn defines what you have free to use.<\/p>\n

At a very simple level, humans have hands, eyes, ears and a voice. (Let\u2019s ignore the ability to ‘feel’ vibrations as that’s alert-only for the moment). Let\u2019s look at some real world scenarios:<\/p>\n