Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship (Paperback)

Description

Interfaces that talk and listen are populating computers, cars, call centers, and even home appliances and toys, but voice interfaces invariably frustrate rather than help. In Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave reveal how interactive voice technologies can readily and effectively tap into the automatic responses all speech -- whether from human or machine -- evokes. Wired for Speech demonstrates that people are "voice-activated": we respond to voice technologies as we respond to actual people and behave as we would in any social situation. By leveraging this powerful finding, voice interfaces can truly emerge as the next frontier for efficient, user-friendly technology.

Wired for Speech presents new theories and experiments and applies them to critical issues concerning how people interact with technology-based voices. It considers how people respond to a female voice in e-commerce (does stereotyping matter?), how a car's voice can promote safer driving (are "happy" cars better cars?), whether synthetic voices have personality and emotion (is sounding like a person always good?), whether an automated call center should apologize when it cannot understand a spoken request ("To Err is Interface; To Blame, Complex"), and much more. Nass and Brave's deep understanding of both social science and design, drawn from ten years of research at Nass's Stanford laboratory, produces results that often challenge conventional wisdom and common design practices. These insights will help designers and marketers build better interfaces, scientists construct better theories, and everyone gain better understandings of the future of the machines that speak with us

描述

說話和聆聽的介面正在普及電腦、汽車、呼叫中心，甚至家用電器和玩具，但語音介面總是令人沮喪而不是有所幫助。在《Wired for Speech》一書中，Clifford Nass和Scott Brave揭示了互動語音技術如何能夠輕鬆有效地利用所有語音（無論是人類還是機器）所引起的自動反應。《Wired for Speech》證明了人們是“語音激活的”：我們對語音技術的反應就像對實際人類的反應一樣，在任何社交場合中都會表現出相應的行為。通過利用這一強大的發現，語音介面可以真正成為高效、用戶友好的技術的下一個前沿。

《Wired for Speech》提出了新的理論和實驗，並將它們應用於關於人們如何與基於技術的語音互動的重要問題。它考慮了人們對電子商務中女性聲音的反應（刻板印象是否重要？），汽車的語音如何促進更安全的駕駛（“快樂”的汽車是否更好？），合成語音是否具有個性和情感（聽起來像人總是好的嗎？），當自動化呼叫中心無法理解口頭請求時是否應該道歉（“界面出錯，複雜負責”），等等。Nass和Brave對社會科學和設計的深入理解，來自Nass在斯坦福實驗室十年的研究，產生了常常挑戰常識和常見設計實踐的結果。這些見解將幫助設計師和營銷人員建立更好的介面，科學家構建更好的理論，並讓每個人更好地理解與我們交談的機器的未來。