How to help people navigate the internet, voice-first
People are using voice because it makes the internet less complex and confusing. At the same time, there are still significant, often frustrating challenges that remain. One is misinterpretation. Voice recognition and speech interpretation technology isn’t perfect yet, so people everywhere experience misinterpretations. But when new users have a bad experience with voice, they tend to blame themselves. A comment we hear a lot is that “it couldn’t understand my accent.” After a few bad experiences, people often just give up.
A second major challenge is self-perception. New internet users can feel like using their voice makes others think they’re uneducated, or they worry that their friends will make fun of them.
On top of this, there are privacy concerns. When people are often surrounded by big groups of people, they’re reluctant to speak to their device because they’re afraid of being overheard.
A playbook for voice technology
Technology can pose challenges for voice users, but if it’s designed and built right, it can also help overcome them.
Drawing on the lessons we’ve learned with our own voice technology, we’ve created a set of principles to guide the industry forward and help technology-makers everywhere think about how to build for voice. When we understand people’s experience of voice, and build around that experience, we can dramatically improve the helpfulness and accessibility of the technology they use.
- We can make voice more discoverable with simple icons (not ‘50s-style microphones) that meet common industry standards, take up greater space on the screen and require no more than one tap to access.
- We can prevent people from becoming frustrated and giving up by making the output they get simpler and easier to digest. (For example, we can break up long passages into simple, shorter sentences when text is being read out.)
- We can reflect new voice users’ daily realities by better supporting the way they speak naturally — whether it’s factoring in pauses for breathing and thinking, or providing greater support for the many multilingual people who switch from one language to another when they’re talking.