The voice user interface: Not Limitations but Opportunities

In a recent piece titled, “What if it were the ‘Eyes-First Revolution’?” I wrote: “The real opportunity when a new interface is introduced is not in figuring out how to best do with this new interface what existing interfaces can do (and probably do very well), but what new problems or new value that the new interface can deliver that can’t be easily delivered by existing interfaces.” The context of my statement is my observation that in the world of building voice first experiences (for instance, ones on smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home), a great deal of energy today is spent on delivering voice solutions to problems that have already been solved very well by the visual interface (mobile apps, web browsers, desktop apps, etc.). People can order tickets using their mobile apps, book a trip using their web browser, read the news on their tablets, so why don’t we just “voicify” these experiences so that people can do the same things, but by using their voice only?

To be sure, there are use cases where the target users or the circumstances of the target users require a voiced version of the visual app (say you have broken an arm, or you are blind, or you are driving — that is, in all cases, your hands or/and your eyes are not available for you to use). In those cases, it makes sense to build a voiced version of the visual UI. But my point in the essay was that the real exciting opportunities for innovating and for delivering new value with voice lie elsewhere: in use cases where the visual interface just can’t solve the problem at all, or solves it, but very poorly.

I say this because providing a voiced version solution to a problem that has been solved well by a visual interface usually requires lots of Voice User Interface (VUI) design chops, since many of the inherent characteristics of the voice interface (for instance, it’s tight coupling with time or its ephemerality) introduce hard complications that just don’t exist in the visual interface, so that an experienced VUI designer is brought to act as a fixer: to mitigate against those characteristics and help deliver something usable. Which is, again, all well and good, except for when one starts making statements that the VUI is inherently challenging. Such a statement is a classic example of plain old bad thinking.