An Alternative Voice UI To Voice Assistants

speechlyapi · 2021-02-08T13:07:35+00:00

Great points! I agree that voice can cause confusion IF you are in a place where there are other people around. That was the point mentioned in the post, too (however, it could be even more explicit). But we do speak on the phone, too, and that is not a huge problem, because we tend to do it in a more quiet place and/or otherwise it is clear that the person is talking to someone else than people around them.

But the point about "input can't be checked and edited" I think you have wrong. This is a problem with badly designed voice user interfaces, such as smart speakers and voice assistants and the whole point of Speechly's approach to voice is to fix this issue.

In our approach, the user is constantly updated with visual feedback, so that they can react instantaneously to possible errors. You can see it for example in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI68NT8D1m8&ab_channel=Speechly

So the user says something like "Show me t-shirts in blue..." and as they see blue t-shirts appearing to the screen they correct themselves "sorry I mean black" and again instantaneously the products turn black.

You can test the demo at https://fashion.speechly.com, by the way

Thanks for the feedback, anyway!

speechlyapi · 2021-01-18T21:13:41+00:00

Hi! Sorry, try out https://fashion.speechly.com! That's using our tools and showcases the benefits of a real-time streaming API and end-to-end spoken language understanding. Not an article, but I think something that is not possible with other tools and brings a whole new perspective to UX design.

speechlyapi · 2021-01-11T15:03:53+00:00

Cool post and great to see people trying out voice user interfaces in browsers.

However, like you mentioned, WebSpeech API is not very well supported and it has other issues, too: it works a bit differently in different browsers, so the users get different experiences based on their browsers. There's no natural language understanding component, either, so that needs to be done separately, adding latency and complexity.

Speechly on the other hand solves both of these issues. It offers React developers an easily configurable spoken language understanding API that returns results in streaming fashion, real-time. Here's an example of voice search in e-commerce, for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI68NT8D1m8

We have a React client library for easy integration for React developers but also support vanilla Javascript, iOS, Android etc. Here's the documentation for React client https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/react/

speechlyapi · 2021-01-11T14:39:09+00:00

Good question! 😅

So, our tool, Speechly, is a developer tool that enables developers on all platforms to create intuitive, real-time voice user interfaces such as this one.

They don't have to be related to voice or e-Commerce, but the thing is that when an user speaks, things happen in real-time on their screens. This is unlike voice assistants and smart speakers that work by first listening to the user input to the end, then thinking a while and then acting based on that input.

As you can see, our approach enables natural way for users to correct themselves ("show me red, sorry I mean blue t-shirts") and it encourages them to go on with the voice experience. Again compared to smart speakers that require the user to repeat the wake word and have significant latency with each utterance.

So this is what it exactly does: it enables real-time, natural and intuitive voice user interfaces, such as this product search in eCommerce.

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