What kind of relationship do you have with your mobile?

Two months into the Sound Barriers Research, and learning many things from professionals and experts across the mobile and Voice User Interface (VUI) worlds.   Many have highlighted the high levels of accuracy and the costs associated with VUI, and some have focused on the user perceptions and expectations associated with VUI.   But what’s getting me thinking now is the social aspects of machines that talk.  What kind of relationship do we need with them, or more properly, how does our relationship with them have to change, for VUI to work?

Of all the means of communication at our disposal, voice (especially face-to-face voice) is the richest and most complex.  There’s not just the audio use of tone, inflection and choice of language, but also cognitive and contextual processes that are going on unconsciously from the moment the verbal exchange begins.  From psychology, we learn that as soon as you talk to something it becomes a social actor, is this why we anthropomorphise the device?  Or the other way around.

All this suggests that speaker-independent natural language voice systems are never likely to be with us, on the contrary, some level of personalisation, or training and learning from the device to the human and vice versa is required in order for VUI to be a usable means of interacting with machines.   As we get to know other people, so we might need to get to know our devices, to form a relationship with them, where they understand us, and we understand them.   What does this mean for UX design in the future?  Will we need to design classes of UX for the same product that have a different load of experience libraries as well as language libraries for the VUI apps to draw on, depending on the segment of the user?  Will we have ‘VUI App walkers’ as the RNIB currently have ‘puppy walkers’ for their would-be guide dogs?

Peter Cochrane, who was recently interviewed for the Sound Barriers project, believes that in the future, machines will have ‘human rights’ so intelligent will they be.  If this is the case, perhaps UX designers in the future will be offering services similar to those brokering human – human relationships?  Speed-dating, introduction services, relationship-counselling services.

Whilst this still seems fantastic, when we can barely get machines & humans to co-operate, and popular science fiction raises dystopic visions of humans being controlled by machines.  I think we can still make use of this knowledge to improve the UX today.  Recognising that if mobile is essential to our customers’ lives, then there already is a relationship between man and mobile, we just have to understand how to improve it to make devices and apps more usable, and our customers more loyal.