figure 1. the siri interface accepts speech as input, attempting to support a dialogue; in the first action, a query for a phone number shows a message conveying the system’s understanding of the question as it performs a search.

figure 2. in the second action, the system replaces the confirmation bubble with the answer, offering a command to make the phone call; note the use of graphics alongside text to enrich the output.

figure 3. in the concluding action, the system partly understands the intention of the question (about a location) but incorrectly interprets a request for a distance as a request for a location.

 

and suggesting promising directions for research.

speech input

Speech-based user interfaces gener-
ally, and speech for search input in
particular, are likely to gain a much
stronger presence in the coming years.
At least three technological trends sup-
port the move toward spoken queries:
First, phone-based mobile devices pro-
vide a natural way to capture speech,
since phones are used in large part
for spoken conversations. Second, the
technology for speech recognition, af-
ter years of only incremental progress,
is improving by leaps and bounds,
thanks to huge data repositories being
generated through the use of mobile
phones. (To assemble a large train-
ing set of spoken corrected data for
its speech-recognition system, Google
hosted, from 2007 to 2010, a free 411
information service for phones. 28) And
third, touch-screen interfaces are in-
creasingly popular, especially when
paired with mobile devices. Neither
small devices nor touch screens lend
themselves well to typing, making spo-
ken input more attractive, though clev-
er finger-swipe-based input methods
(such as Shape Writer for entering text39
and Gesture Search for menu naviga-
tion19) provide compelling alternatives
to typing.

 

social search: collaboration Though observational studies have found that people often search collaboratively, tools have only recently been developed to explicitly support people searching together. Such support reflects a broader research renaissance in tools for real-time shared activity (such as shared online whiteboards and document-editing tools).