The Voice User Interface Designers (VUIDs) Group

Phil Shinn

SLTC Newsletter, April 2009

The VUIDs group ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vuids/ ) is an on-line community of people interested in voice user interface design. It was started in August of 2003, and has about 500 members. It was started as a place where professional VUIDs (that is, developers of commercial applications) could discuss issues of interest and learn from each other. For example, if you wanted to know what the end-of-speech timeout value should be when collecting a phone number, this is the place to ask.

Anyone can join the group, but postings from new users are moderated. Moderators make sure posts from new users are appropriate. If a new user's post isn't spam, a moderator will change the poster's status to unmoderated. Members can choose individual delivery options for messages, including: none (just visit on the web); individual messages as they arrive; or daily summaries. The site averages a couple of posts a day. Members can also choose to keep their email addresses private. The site has a place for putting links to other sites of interest, and a place to store files of interest.

All the 2,123 posts are available online and are searchable, and are organized into threads. Posts fit into three general categories: serious discussions (the vast majority); humor (mainly chagrin over horrible VUI's or pointers to items like the SNL skit of Amtrak's Julie on a date); and transactional, like job postings, calls for papers and announcements.

Recent serious threads include:

• The detection of swearing, and what to do about it
• Sensitivity tuning guidelines
• Calls for people interested in speech and medical applications
• Questions about listening comprehension and digit concatenation strategies
• Alphanumeric recognition strategies
• Adaptive audio
• No-blame error prompting
• The design of an experiment to sort out the effects of different pause durations on usability
• Silence suppression
• A VUID career satisfaction survey and discussion of career training
• A study of what words people use when they say letters of the alphabet
• Prompt tapering
• Offshore design and development
• How to collect email addresses
• Elder-speak
• The effect of gender on intelligibility

... and this is just in the last six months.

To join up, just visit the URL above and click on the button labeled 'Join this group'.

Phil Shinn, founder of the VUIDs groups, is a Customer Interaction Designer and Speech Scientist at Genesys Telecommunication Labs, an Alcatel-Lucent company. Phil has a PhD in Linguistics from Brown University has been designing and building speech applications since 1984. email: philshinn@yahoo.com