Voice Platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant became very popular in the last few years. They are made possible through the huge progress in speech to text interpretation and natural language understanding in the last years. Voice Systems enable users an alternative user interface and user experience.
In the following I want to talk about the benefits of voice systems and how they can support us in our day to day life. I will probably be very enthusiastic and positive about this technology in this blog post. Nevertheless there is also critics about voice systems. Therefore I will publish a counter part “Reasons against Voice Systems” in the next time.
But first let’s list up the benefits of voice systems.
The interaction via voice provides many advantages.
It is (in most cases) much faster than traditional text input. Most people can talk much faster than they write and therefore speech can offer more information than text in the same time to voice platforms.
Because we can query faster, we also get the result of our query faster and this saves us time.
There are situations in our life where we can not (and where we should not, but I will mention this in the next paragraph) use or hands to interact with out smartphone. Speech is one convenient way to transmit information even if we have to juggle torches. There are probably not so many people who are juggling torches, but there are many situations where we can not access our smartphone because we do other activities like showering or cooking.
Texting while driving is illegal and there are good reasons why:
The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year. Nearly 390,000 injuries occur each year from accidents caused by texting while driving. 1 out of every 4 car accidents in the United States is caused by texting and driving. General Cell Phone Statistics
By simply speaking our text messages instead of writing them we can avoid stress, save money and most important protect our health.
Not every person can interact with the traditional interaction possibilities like smartphones or keyboards.
The estimated number of people visually impaired in the world is 285 million, 39 million blind and 246 million having low vision. 65 % of people visually impaired and 82% of all blind are 50 years and older. These are numbers of the Global Data On visual impairments of the World Health organization in 2010.
Blindness is of course only one reason for people to use traditional interaction, but it is the biggest target group I can think of.
Because we live in the digital age content digital content is super important. Therefore also people who are blind or have low vision should be do online whatever everybody else does: Connect, Share, Discuss, Consume and Interact.
Unfortunately the content for people who are blind or have low vision is limited, even through the use of screen readers.
Voice can help here to make the life for these people more fair. They can help by bringing the whole internet to these people.
Voice makes information overall more accessible and creates fairness in the digital age for people.
Nowadays Voice Systems can (mostly) understand what we are saying through the use of natual language progressing (NLP).
We can simply speak to them and say them what they should do with natual language.
Therefore we can transmit information very simple and in a convenient way which also makes it easier for older and younger people to interact with digital systems.
Voice Systems can support us in our day to day life because of various reasons. It also helps people who can not use traditional user input interaction, to connect to the internet.
Thanks for reading! As said earlier, In the next days I will publish a counter part “Reasons against voice systems” on my blog. Meanwhile you can follow me on Twitter.
Written on December 27th, 2018 by Lasse Schultebraucks