VUIs (Voice User Interfaces) is the ability a virtual assistant has to respond to a voice commands utilizing NLU (Natural Language Understanding), NLP (Natural Language Processing) and speech recognition technologies.
Speech is more intuitive and natural for humans to communicate with each other while it also helps us gain important information and context, this is why voice assistants have become more popular in the last year with multiple uses from home, health, entertainment, businesses and many other sectors.
VUI technology is becoming more sophisticated and reliable, being fast to adopt and leaving the users with higher satisfaction levels than conventional chat or text assistants.
But what are the real advantages of Voice and Speech recognition technology?
- Users don’t need to be trained on how to use the interface
Finding and understanding how to use new features on a system can be difficult, especially for new users. When you have many menus, dropdowns or information to display to the user they can feel overwhelmed and frustrated to not know how to pick what they’re looking for.
Voice can help ease the user to reach their goal on your product faster, just by voicing a command to the assistant and finding what they’re looking for immediately, offering more flexibility than a text/visual only interface.
- Makes your product more accessible for the users
Accessibility is essential in this day and age, we have all suffered from a disability whether that is temporary or permanent so making your product accessible is a must.
Many groups of individuals rely on voice features to navigate the internet completely and even people who want to limit their keyboard use due to fatigue or cognitive disabilities.
Incorporating voice will help include a good section of the population that is often overlooked, placing you and your product in the competitive advantage in front of those with less accessible products for the users.
- Boost productivity levels
Voice can provide support and assistance to customer support or task management, it allows you access to the information you need with just one voice command, taking less time than it would to type out a query on a text or visual only interface. Stanford’s study has stated that speech is three times faster than typing.
Voice prevents you from having to use hardware to achieve your goal, for example taking out your phone to get a direction from Google Maps, minimizing the risk of accidents.
- Users will connect with your brand and product
Voice for the users feels more like a human interaction, providing comfort when the VUI actually understands what the user is saying and providing an accurate response to the intent and feeling of the user.
Voice provides a personality to your brand, it can be programmed to have humor, to be kind or to be friendly. All of those human traits the VUI learns over time, will make the user feel more connected to the brand.
Speech has the freedom that it can be applied for any industry, so the benefits are not only for the tech community. Voice can significantly improve the user experience and make the interaction with the product be more efficient. It ultimately, when done correctly, combines the best of the graphical and voice interfaces in benefit for the user reducing time and fatigue.
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