Speech-based interaction: myths, challenges, and opportunities

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research has for long been dedicated to better and more naturally facilitating information transfer between humans and machines. Unfortunately, humans' most natural form of communication, speech, is also one of the most difficult modalities to be understood by machines. This is largely due to speech being the highest-bandwidth communication channel we possess. As such, significant research efforts, from engineering, to linguistic, and to cognitive sciences, have been spent during the past several decades on improving machines' ability to understand speech. Yet, the MobileHCI community (and HCI in general) has been relatively timid in embracing this modality as a central focus of research. This can be attributed in part to the relatively discouraging levels of accuracy in understanding speech, in contrast with often-unfounded claims of success from industry, but also to the intrinsic difficulty of designing and especially evaluating speech and natural language interfaces.

The goal of this course is to inform the MobileHCI community of the current state of speech and natural language research, to dispel some of the myths surrounding speech-based interaction, as well as to provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to learn more about how speech recognition and speech synthesis work, what are their limitations, and how they could be used to enhance current interaction paradigms. Through this, we hope that MobileHCI researchers and practitioners will learn how to combine recent advances in speech processing with user-centred principles in designing more usable and useful speech-based interactive systems.