lauren's library blog

iPhone Voice Controls

I’ve been thinking a lot about talking to computers lately. And then I saw Brian Mathew’s post over at the Ubiquitous Librarian. As Brian points out, you can literally talk to your iPhone (at least some specific commands). You can swipe your fingers across the screen and make things happen, in some cases rendering the keyboard unnecessary. (I admit, just like some children, I occasionally touch my monitor expecting it to behave like my phone.) We saw the Kindle come out with a keyboard, and the Nook followed with a touchscreen interface. I bought a netbook (because of the keyboard) several months ago, but now it’s clear that tablets are on their way, and a traditional keyboard just isn’t part of that equation.

So how are we going to communicate with computers in another 10-20 years? I think Brian’s right in that we’ll be moving away from a keyboard dominated environment, though there’s certainly going to be a continued role for them as one of many ways of communicating with devices. What are some other options? The way I see it, here are a few:

• Voice (as Brian points out)
• Flexible touch screen (as in the iPhone/Droid/etc, or the Microsoft Surface)
• Location aware devices (like many smart phones today)
• And I’m sure there are others, like writing. (I’m thinking here of how you can send a photo of writing to Evernote, and it’s smart enough to search the full text of the image.)

But I’m left really thinking about voice. Clearly we’re going to see more of an impact here in the near future. Automated translation is getting pretty good, at least throughout the Google suite of products. Google Voice transcribes voicemail and sends it to you as an email or text messages. Their Audio Indexing allows you to search through what is said in a video. Google’s mobile voice search and 411 do a pretty good job of transcription, too. The Dragon Dictation [iTunes link] iPhone app does something similar (and reminds me of the old Jott–I quit using it once you had to pay): you record a message, it turns into text, then you can cut and paste as you wish.

Dragon Dictation

And, just like some of Brian’s commenters, I’m having a hard time imaging communicating with a computer in this way with regularity. For now, it works really well when I’m trying to be hands-free, when the voice to text happens before it gets to me (a la Google Voice), when I’m showing off the feature for novelty,  or when I remember it (which, frankly isn’t all that often). But I remember it more often now than I did several months ago. And NC just became text message free in the car, which makes me want to be hands free in general, despite the fact I wasn’t a car text messager in the first place. And now that I’m thinking of it more often it’s making more sense to interact with the phone in this way. It’s still really silly, though, if I’m around someone else, or in a public place… so there’s a whole cultural thing to adjust too as well.

It’ll be interesting to watch the little ones, like the 7 year old discussed in Brian’s comments. Clearly, they’re the ones we’re preparing for today. What will they be comfortable with? What will they expect?

A few years ago I was part of a focus group with some of our students, and they said they liked our electronic journals because they were easier to find than paper ones in the stacks, but that they much preferred paper, so they printed everything off (even if they weren’t sure that they’d read the article). Just a few years later that’s less true at MPOW (though, there are still a bunch of students in that camp). Many are getting more comfortable with screen reading, and it’s a matter of time until we see it tip to be the majority.

Last year a colleague and I held a focus group on our screencast Toolkit project. The number one request? Transcripts of the screencasts. They wanted to watch the video in public places, but didn’t always have headphones. Transcripts would allow them to watch the video in silence, but skim the text to see what points were being covered. So, we were already seeing a shift to a clear interest in multimedia, but wanting the flexibility and silence that text allows. How much longer until that’s less of an issue? At what point does the automated transcription become so good that it’s always built into multimedia? When does the culture of silence start to give way?

Not that I necessarily am looking forward to that, or that I think it’s a good idea. It just seems inevitable at this point. So now I’m thinking more about how you prepare for it. Does this mean lots more audio in our web presence? More opportunities for students to interact with our services via voice? More individually sized study rooms so that people can speak to their computers in the library, without bothering others? Who knows. But it’s probably good to start thinking about it now.

What do you think?

(As an aside, from the instructional design perspective, I love how the tag cloud in the background of the iPhone voice controls actually teaches you the commands it will recognize. If Apple chooses to add additional voice controls, they can just add the term here, without having to send messages to all iPhone users to let them know. Point-of-need instruction in the most practical of ways!)

Related posts:

1. Computers and Cloud Computing
2. the dvorak keyboard
3. Google’s Phone Solution
4. computers in the classroom
5. open video from MIT