Two dogmas of voice user interface design — Part One

As currently practiced, Voice User Interface Design has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief that voice user interfaces between humans and voicebots should aim to emulate as much as possible the way humans converse with each other. The other dogma is the notion that it is the responsibility of the designer to communicate affordances. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them, as we shall propose, is the adoption of a new framing along with practices that deliver robust voicebots that stand a greater chance of fulfilling their promise. Another effect is the promotion of strategies that mobilize stakeholders other than designers to ensure proper framing and priming of users before they engage with voicebots.

In his seminal paper, “Is Spoken Language All-or-Nothing,” Roger K. Moore wrote about what he called a “habituality gap” in human-to-voicebot interactions. In a nutshell, Moore argues that when humans engage with a voicebot that starts out sounding and conversationally behaving like a human being, they will at some point in the exchange experience a “perception tension:” they start out perceiving human behavior and so set up expectations that are inevitably disappointed because the voicebot is unable to keep up with those expectations. Similarly, in his delightful book, It’s Better to Be a Good Machine Than a Bad Person, Bruce B. Balentine reminds us that human beings readily accept new technologies, imperfect as they may be, as long as those technologies deliver some incremental value, no matter how small, and where humans are better off using them than not. Think of the early generations of radios, automobiles, TVs, VCRs, cell phones, he observes, and how laughably imperfect they were then compared to what they eventually evolved to become. Then he asks the following astute question: How come humans embraced such imperfect technologies and for decades put up with their glaring imperfections as those technologies evolved and matured, while no such adoption and indulgence has been extended to voicebots? His answer: the user of such voicebots continues to be promised something that cannot be delivered. Instead of looking back to an age where nothing existed and now something exists, or the previous version where a feature didn’t exist and new one has been added, the user is…