Book Image

Voice User Interface Projects

By : Henry Lee
Book Image

Voice User Interface Projects

By: Henry Lee

Overview of this book

From touchscreen and mouse-click, we are moving to voice- and conversation-based user interfaces. By adopting Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), you can create a more compelling and engaging experience for your users. Voice User Interface Projects teaches you how to develop voice-enabled applications for desktop, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This book explains in detail VUI and its importance, basic design principles of VUI, fundamentals of conversation, and the different voice-enabled applications available in the market. You will learn how to build your first voice-enabled application by utilizing DialogFlow and Alexa’s natural language processing (NLP) platform. Once you are comfortable with building voice-enabled applications, you will understand how to dynamically process and respond to the questions by using NodeJS server deployed to the cloud. You will then move on to securing NodeJS RESTful API for DialogFlow and Alexa webhooks, creating unit tests and building voice-enabled podcasts for cars. Last but not the least you will discover advanced topics such as handling sessions, creating custom intents, and extending built-in intents in order to build conversational VUIs that will help engage the users. By the end of the book, you will have grasped a thorough knowledge of how to design and develop interactive VUIs.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introduction

In the future, user interfaces will move away from being touch-based and mouse-clicking web interfaces to voice and conversation-based user interfaces. On average, a person speaks about 20,000 words a day (http://bit.ly/2GYZ1du), which is the equivalent of reading half a book, and voice commands are 5 times faster to process (http://hci.stanford.edu/research/speech/index.html) than web user interfaces or typing. The huge efficiency of voice commands is attributed to the fact that speaking is natural to everyone. The technological leaps in natural language processing (NLP), thanks to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), and increased computing power has made it possible to accurately understand and process complex human voices and speech patterns. This book will teach developers how to create voice-enabled applications using NLP platforms such as Google's Dialogflow and Amazon's Alexa Skills Skit, and deploy them to personal digital assistant devices, such as Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Google's Android Auto.

This chapter covers the history of voice user interfaces (VUIs) and discusses what VUIs are. It will help you understand the roles NLP platforms play in the development of VUIs. The chapter also introduces modern voice-enabled applications such as chatbots, personal digital assistant devices, and automobile virtual assistant systems, and how VUIs can be beneficial to such applications. You will then learn about user experience and design principles to deliver compelling voice-enabled applications to consumers. Finally, this chapter ends by looking at both current and predicted future capabilities of digital personal assistant devices.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • History of VUIs
  • Basic concepts of VUIs
  • NLP platforms
  • Benefits of VUIs
  • Chatbots, Amazon Echo, Google Home, and automobile virtual assistant systems
  • Best practices, design principles, and user experiences when creating VUIs
  • Current and predicted future capabilities of digital personal assistant devices