At first, it seemed as if this was far away from social enterprise and charitable work such as betavine Social Exchange.  Now, ‘tho I’m beginning to think that advertising might be the most active enabler of social enterprise that we know today.  To begin with, there are the thousands of free services that are ad-funded.  Just think of Google’s many products and services.  There are also models in emerging markets where advertising is lowering the cost of access to communications.  In South Africa,  Vodacom’s ‘Please Call Me’ is ad-funded.  The service enables customers to text the ‘phone number of the person they want to call them to a short code.  The recipient receives a message from the sender which includes an advert and giving them the number of the person who wants to get in touch.  It improves access to communications for people in poorer communities, and is now being ingeniously used as a free micro – SMS service, customers have developed their own abbreviations, enabling them to make use of the spare characters to send messages which negate the need for a ‘phone call altogether.  Advertisers are flooding to use the service which has tremendous reach.

As neither Vodacom nor Google can easily be described as not-for-profit, I hardly considered advertising and social enterprise in the same breath, until I met Marc Lewis, an entrepeneur and creative expert who is also the driving force behind the School of Communication Arts 2.0 (#SCA2).  SCA2 will open in September 2010, it offers vocational training for advertising professionals on 3 pathways.  Art Directors, Copywriters, and Ideapreneurs.  SCA is unique in a number of ways:

• 50% of places will go to scholarship students, improving diversity in the advertising industry which is woefully under-representative of the population as a whole.
• SCA will have an investment fund, which will invest in student ideas
• The school is supported by 300 industry mentors drawn not just from the fields of advertising, but also those of finance, education, business and technology
• The curriculum is a unique, open wiki.  We’re building it here, it’ll ensure that the content is always fresh, relevant and up to date.  Inglis Jane will be contributing content to the Ideapreneur Pathway, on product and innovation management, as well as Inclusive and User-Centred Design.

I think SCA2 has a winning combination of social enterprise and advertising creativity.  The open nature of the venture, as well as the grass-roots support from industry, will produce qualified, entrepeneurial advertising professionals and some interesting new business ventures.  Watch out for graduates from SCA2, they will be like pots of peanut butter and jelly swirl.

It is clear that it is not voice as a user interface, but voice in the user interface that offers the best opportunities in mobile. In order to exploit those opportunities, we can learn much from VUI design and development that applies to the mobile user experience design now.  The way in which users interact with VUI gives us tools and techniques of practical use in designing and developing better mobile apps and devices, a blue-print for Intelligent Mobile User Experience Design.

Just as Mobile Web 2.0 requires new interfaces and aspects to user experience to be successful (e.g. iPhone UI), so too will the mobile semantic Web 3.0 require the same.  Mobile and mobile devices are key to the success of the semantic web itself as included will be sensors and wearable computers.   Hence, mobile product managers, product developers, designers and marketeers will need to approach user experience design at new levels and in a new way.  There are 5 features to what we will call, Intelligent Mobile User Experience  (IMUX)

1. Use of multi-sensory user interfaces to gather redundant information and detect context
2. Multiple user paths dependent on analysis of data and application of intelligence, leading to increased personalisation of services
3. More multi-disciplinary teams, understanding of how the user’s think and behave becomes as important as how the technology works and behaves
4. Continuous product development and enhancement by the users themselves
5. As well as capability axis sensory, physical and cognitive[1], designers must also consider social factors.  Devices and applications will have their capabilities measured in the same way as we currently measure users.

Having only just come to these conclusions, I am starting to wonder what the impacts might be on how we design, develop and manage mobile products and services?

You can find out more about Sound Barriers here

[1] Inclusive Design principle – users are measured in terms of their sensory, physical and cognitative capabilties compared with those required to operate the product or service.

In my research I have found, when you talk to a machine, if that machine understands you and reacts to your speech input it becomes a social actor in your life. You apply the same social rules and expectations and treat the machine as you would a human (Reeves, 1996).

I have been thinking of how this theory can help us further understand why VUI just isn’t being taken up by users on a mass scale. The theory suggests that simply talking to a machine or device will automatically enter it into our social world. Humans are made up of many social factors of which speech is part but can speech alone make us human? Probably not. We are much more inclined to be drawn to a voice that has some extra information to back up the voice and aid our understanding. One of the most obvious things that pops into my mind is a face, even when we talk to a person on the phone, for whom we have never met, we are inclined to picture how we expect this person to look from the sound of their voice. Or at least it is a natural expectation that the voice actually has a face.

So, in terms of voice technology and in particular voice synthesis, this brings me to thinking, can we psychologically deal with a voice that has no face? Furthermore, can we humanise a device that speaks to us that we know doesn’t have a face. Let’s here take it back to the mobile phone, there is nothing physically human about a mobile phone, compared to say a car which can be seen to have headlights for eyes, a hood line for a mouth, and turn signals for facial expressions (McCloud, 1993; Norman, 1992). Perhaps that’s why we feel comfortable naming our car. I know I have never named my mobile phone.

The point is, talking to a machine comes with social aspects, unless these social aspects are backed up with more social information, I doubt simply interacting through voice makes a machine human. So what does this mean for our research? Well perhaps the user issue with VUI is rooted in the fact we don’t want to talk to a device and create a social actor unless that device has some sort of extra human information to begin with. It’s not so much ‘I talk to my mobile therefore it is now human’ but more ‘I need to see the human in my phone in order to feel comfortable talking to it’. So is the key to VUI success personification? Perhaps. If we are to accept using a voice interface in our mobile phones we need first to have some personalisaion of that object. If that can be achieved then maybe users will be more willing to talk to their mobiles and enter them into the social space through the use of voice. Or put simply, perhaps that voice needs a face.

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.

The project is not for a client, it’s just born out of interest and a belief that increasingly we will be working with voice as an option or as part of richer application interfaces from devices.  So I am carrying out the research using as many ‘free’ means at my disposal.  I also know this is a vast and complex field, so interviewing experts from the voice ‘eco-system’ as well as those in mobile, is only part of the process.  I’d also like to engage in debate online here through the blog.  Working in this way, I intend to share the results of the research freely with all those who participate.   We intend to publish an initial analysis for research partners in September 2009.  You can join the research by commenting here, or email me