In our September Brown Bag, perennial favorite Bruce Balentine, Chief Scientist Emeritus, Enterprise Integration Group, speaks to us about “Discoverability in Spoken User Interfaces”. Registration is free for all interested through Eventbrite.

Tuesday, September 10 at 12 PM – 1 PM CDT
Register For This Event

Non-trivial user interfaces—those that require multiple turns to accomplish complex tasks—benefit when user and machine adapt to each other. Champions of voice claim that speech uniquely exhibits this plasticity. But it doesn’t unless the interface is designed to be discoverable. Discoverability requires systemic characteristics including trust, user-initiated backup moves, rewards for experimentation, and internal transparency. This session discusses specific design techniques that allow and encourage user exploration with low risk and a likely early payoff.

Bruce Balentine is a design consultant specializing in speech, audio, and multimodal user interfaces. In almost three decades of work with speech recognition and related speech technologies, Balentine has designed user interfaces for telecommunications, desktop multimedia, entertainment, language training, medical, in-vehicle, and home automation products. As Chief Scientist for EIG and head of EIG Labs, he leads EIG’s ongoing speech recognition usability R&D program, and — in addition to providing professional IVR consulting services — instructs at EIG workshops.

Upcoming Brown Bag Events:

Tue, Oct 22, 12 PM – 1 PM CDT
The Engineering of Emotion

Tue, Nov 5, 12 PM – 1PM CDT
Challenges of Implementing Voice Control for Space Applications