The State of Speech in HCI: Trends, Themes and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews 68 studies on speech interfaces in HCI, highlighting current research themes, methods, and key challenges such as theory development, multi-user interaction, and measurement reliability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive mapping of empirical research in speech HCI, identifying gaps and proposing future directions for theory, design, and evaluation improvements.

Findings

Focus on usability and system experience studies.

Identification of nine key research themes.

Highlighting gaps in theory, multi-user research, and measurement methods.

Abstract

Speech interfaces are growing in popularity. Through a review of 68 research papers this work maps the trends, themes, findings and methods of empirical research on speech interfaces in HCI. We find that most studies are usability/theory-focused or explore wider system experiences, evaluating Wizard of Oz, prototypes, or developed systems by using self-report questionnaires to measure concepts like usability and user attitudes. A thematic analysis of the research found that speech HCI work focuses on nine key topics: system speech production, modality comparison, user speech production, assistive technology \& accessibility, design insight, experiences with interactive voice response (IVR) systems, using speech technology for development, people's experiences with intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) and how user memory affects speech interface interaction. From these insights we identify gaps and challenges in speech research, notably the need to develop theories of speech interface interaction, grow critical mass in this domain, increase design work, and expand research from single to multiple user interaction contexts so as to reflect current use contexts. We also highlight the need to improve measure reliability, validity and consistency, in the wild deployment and reduce barriers to building fully functional speech interfaces for research.