Speechgrinder has changed its name to Speechly! Our services or products are not affected by the change and we'll continue on building the best spoken language understanding tools for developers as Speechly.

Speechgrinder is Now Speechly

Voice chat has become an essential feature in many games and social media platforms. Axlebolt Studios [found](https://unity.com/case-study/axlebolt-standoff-2#voice-chat-mobile) that adding Voice Chat to Standoff 2 improved 90 day retention rates by over 60%.

Tod Bouris of Vivox showed figures dramatically higher at [Unite Copenhagen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwZawWFVoPs) in 2019. “The metrics show that people that use communications during their gaming, game more and more often than those who don’t. Voice is a social element that adds stickiness and retention to your games that you can’t get from anywhere else.” Voice chat users, he said, [spent twice the amount of time](https://www.slideshare.net/unity3d/using-vivox-to-connect-your-players-text-and-voice-comms-unite-copenhagen-2019) playing as non-voice users and were five times more likely to be playing after five weeks.   

An Oxford Academic study from 2007 found that “voice chat leads to stronger bonds and deeper empathy than text chat.” As Subspace put it in 2021, “Voice deepens the immersive world, helps forge social bonds, and strengthens online play.”  

Given the benefits and user expectations, it is no wonder that online games, social media platforms, and metaverses are providing voice chat. However, there is a downside. 

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## The Toxicity Highway

We also know from [research](https://www.speechly.com/blog/online-harassment-stats) by Pew, ADL, and others that voice chat is also a primary source of toxic behavior and harassment in online games. And the impact of these negative behaviors leads between a quarter and a third of users to reduce their gameplay or avoid specific games altogether. 

The answer to this problem is, of course, moderation. But this is where the complications emerge. Voice chat is more complex than text chat because you first need to capture and analyze the voice data before you can apply the text analysis tools. This is where companies make mistakes that undermine their key objectives.

## Voice Chat Moderation Mistake 1 - The Human Touch

There may always be a human element in voice chat moderation, but you just cannot scale humans cost-effectively enough to monitor all chats or user generated content at all times. One human-led approach is to simply record chats and then only review them when a complaint is filed. This is also time intensive, provides no early warning system, introduces individual bias into the evaluation process, and hiring typically cannot keep up with usage growth. 

Human-led moderation only seems to work at a very small scale with volunteer community monitoring. Smaller Discord servers are an example of this. Anything else requires automation of the moderation process. 

## Voice Chat Moderation Mistake 2 - The Sloppy Transcription

Not all automated voice chat monitoring will give you the same results. The most common mistake that arises with these solutions is poor transcriptions. After you have transcribed the voice chat into text, you can more rapidly and cost-effectively analyze the data for toxicity and harassment or validate complaints. 

What happens when the transcriptions are poor? A poor transcription can result in errors of omission and commission. The omission errors miss the bad behavior because they either misunderstand words or the context of the comments. The commission errors flag normal behavior is bad. Another term for this is [False Negatives](https://www.speechly.com/blog/how-to-fine-tune-speech-to-text-for-voice-moderation) and [False Positives](https://www.speechly.com/blog/how-to-fine-tune-speech-to-text-for-voice-moderation).

[Automatic speech recognition](https://www.speechly.com/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary) (ASR) is not easy to do well. Users are often speaking quickly, may have accents, and use industry or company specific jargon in their speech. Plus, the audio quality is not always good, there may be noise in the background, and it is highly variable across users and environments. All of these factors make it hard to produce a high-quality transcript which can undermine the automated analysis of the data. 

These same challenges may lead to errors of commission – identifying problems where they don’t exist. This can also be a big issue. If you incorrectly flag a user or take action against a user without cause, it undermines their loyalty and often leads to negative comments both within and outside of the game or community. Plus, inadvertently flagging a benign comment for human moderation review adds cost unnecessarily. 

Few ASR solutions are designed for all of these challenges. Producing high-fidelity transcripts and analyses often require you to train the speech recognition model for a particular use case. The off-the-shelf cloud speech recognition models typically have significant limitations in customization in addition to one more big problem.  

## Voice Chat Moderation Mistake 3 - The Money Pit 

It is clear that human-led moderation practices don’t scale very well in terms of cost. The same is true for many cloud-based ASRs. One moderately sized metaverse with 50,000+ daily active users (DAUs) saw a bill of nearly $15,000 for one day of cloud-based voice chat transcription from a popular provider. And this pricing rate doesn’t decline significantly as scale rises. 

Relying solely on cloud-based transcription can become prohibitively expensive very quickly. People using voice chat are active users, and that means they talk a lot, and that means your transcription costs rise rapidly. One company we spoke with found that their efforts to “optimize” cost led to poorer results and other hidden expenses, so they abandoned moderation altogether. We know that is not a good idea. So, the question is, how do you provide high-quality automated moderation tools that minimize errors and cost while also providing a healthy voice chat experience? 

## Avoiding Voice Chat Moderation Mistakes

Speechly offers solutions that run in the cloud, on devices, or in a hybrid model. In addition, our accuracy is higher than leading ASR solutions such as Google, even before the optimization of custom model training which is a feature we also offer. These elements combine to provide a dramatic improvement in both cost and accuracy. 

Many games, social networks, and metaverses have learned some hard lessons about text chat moderation. Our hope is that you can avoid having to learn the new lessons of voice chat moderation by avoiding three of the common mistakes. 

How did we learn about these? We met with over 20 professionals working in online gaming, the metaverse and social media earlier this year to learn about their challenges. They were interested in using Speechly for some other features, and it turned out to be an optimal solution for automating voice chat moderation. And they liked the fact that we can provide the data to the existing moderation software without having to duplicate systems or replace them. 

Let us know if you have faced these mistakes in the past or have any questions. You can reach out to us using our [Contact Us](https://www.speechly.com/contact) form or try out our API for free by [Signing Up](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/#/signup) for an account.

Photo by George Becker from [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/1-1-3-text-on-black-chalkboard-374918/)

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Voice chat has become an essential feature in many games and social media platforms making Moderation a critical thing to get right. 

3 Common Voice Chat Moderation Mistakes


COVID-19 has resulted in a massive shift in user behavior. Primarily, our lives are becoming more digital in both everyday consumer life as well as in the enterprise as the world was forced to adopt “Remote Work”. This reality has led to a massive increase in the amount of audio data the world is generating on a daily basis at both work and home. Here is a list of 30 data points to show the impact of COVID-19 on remote work and to put into perspective just how much audio data is generated by the world.

## COVID-19 impact on Remote Work & Time Spent Online

### Remote Work

##### One of the most noticeable impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic was the quick shift to remote work.

* 20% to 25% of the workforces in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week. This represents four to five times more remote work than before the pandemic. - [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-after-covid-19)
* Employers started adjusting their workplaces to fit a new hybrid working model as nearly 70% of full-time U.S. workers have worked remotely, with many continuing to do so. - [Owl Labs](https://owllabs.com/state-of-remote-work/2021/)
* 90% of respondents that worked from home during the pandemic said they were as productive -- or more -- when compared to the office. - [Owl Labs](https://owllabs.com/state-of-remote-work/2021/)

### Time Spent Online

##### Another noticeable impact of the pandemic was an increase in time spent online and the importance of the internet.

* 90% of adults say the internet has been essential or important to them personally during the pandemic. - [Pew Research](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/09/01/the-internet-and-the-pandemic/)
* 40% of adults have used the internet in a new way during the pandemic. - [Pew Research](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/09/01/the-internet-and-the-pandemic/)
* 72% of parents say their kids are spending more time in front of screens than prior to the pandemic. - [Pew Research](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/09/01/the-internet-and-the-pandemic/)

## Showing the Rise in Audio Data

### Social Audio and Call Center Data

##### Audio data has risen across consumer and enterprise use cases through new categories such as Social Audio and existing channels like Call Centers.

* Clubhouse surpassed 10 million registered users as of February 13, 2021. - [Voicebot](https://voicebot.ai/2021/02/23/clubhouse-surpasses-10-million-users-after-musk-zuckerberg-rogan-and-mrbeast-join-and-starts-drawing-more-scrutiny/)
* The rapid growth of Social Audio on Clubhouse caught the attention of Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, Reddit, Amazon, and LinkedIn who have all added Social Audio as a feature of their own platforms. - [HighFidelity Link](https://www.highfidelity.com/blog/most-popular-social-audio-apps), [Social Media Today](https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/linkedin-launches-test-of-audio-rooms-announces-new-formats-for-live-event/616776/), [Voicebot](https://voicebot.ai/2022/03/08/amazons-new-amp-app-spins-a-social-audio-radio-dj-mash-up-with-amazon-music-catalog-as-the-soundtrack/), [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/talk)
* Alongside the pandemic Discord users rose from 56M in 2019 -> 140M in 2021 with peak concurrent users hitting 10.6M in 2020. - [Business of Apps](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/)
* Discord users spend 4 billion minutes in conversation daily. - [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/30/21308194/discord-gaming-users-safety-center-video-voice-chat)
* Overall call volume to contact centers jumped over 600% from normal levels, while agent call capacity dropped by 20% during COVID-19. - [Deloitte](https://www2.deloitte.com/il/en/pages/innovation/Solutions/Innovation_Challenges_Challenge_1.html)

### Video Conferencing and Social Video Data

##### Video usage has also surged in new and traditional channels such as videos on Social Media or Video Conferencing - all of which come with a multitude of Audio data.

* Zoom had over 300 million meeting participants per day in 2020 - [GetvVoIP](https://getvoip.com/blog/2020/07/07/video-conferencing-stats/#:~:text=62%25%20of%20companies%20use%20three,active%20daily%20users%20in%202021.)
* Google Meet had over 100 million daily meeting participants in 2020 - [GetvVoIP](https://getvoip.com/blog/2020/07/07/video-conferencing-stats/#:~:text=62%25%20of%20companies%20use%20three,active%20daily%20users%20in%202021.)
* Microsoft Teams had 250 million active daily users in 2021. - [GetvVoIP](https://getvoip.com/blog/2020/07/07/video-conferencing-stats/#:~:text=62%25%20of%20companies%20use%20three,active%20daily%20users%20in%202021.)
* Cisco WebEx currently has over 324 million users. - [GetvVoIP](https://getvoip.com/blog/2020/07/07/video-conferencing-stats/#:~:text=62%25%20of%20companies%20use%20three,active%20daily%20users%20in%202021.)
* 500 million viewers watch 100 million hours of video content on Facebook daily - [99Firms](https://99firms.com/blog/facebook-video-statistics/#gref)
* As of Q4 2021, Tik Tok had 1 billion MAUs. - [Business of Apps](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/)
* As of 2019, 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide - [Tubefilter](https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/number-hours-video-uploaded-to-youtube-per-minute/)
* Twitch has 140 million monthly active users and 30 million daily active users. - [Earthweb](https://earthweb.com/twitch-statistics/)
* On Twitch creators Broadcasted for 88.7 Million Hours in January 2021 alone. - [Influencer Marketing Hub](https://influencermarketinghub.com/twitch-stats/#toc-8)

### Multiplayer Games Data

##### Multiplayer gaming continued to grow through 2022 across many major brands. A crucial component of any Multiplayer game is reliable Voice Chat which is why this makes our list.

* PUBG has over 520M monthly active users and over 43M daily active users, as of March 2022. - [ActivePlayer](https://activeplayer.io/pubg/)
* Minecraft has over 172M monthly active users and over 15M peak players in a day, as of March 2022. - [ActivePlayer](https://activeplayer.io/minecraft/)
* Fortnite has over 271M monthly active users and over 24M peak players in a day, as of March 2022. - [ActivePlayer](https://activeplayer.io/fornite/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20our%20records%20shows,and%2025%20million%20daily%20players.)
* Roblox has over 213M monthly active users and over 21M max players in a day, as of March 2022. - [ActivePlayer](https://activeplayer.io/roblox/)
* Apex Legends has over 119M monthly active users and over 11M max daily players, as of March 2022. - [ActivePlayer](https://activeplayer.io/apex-legends-live-player-count-and-statistics/#:~:text=In%202019%20Apex%20Legends%20garnered,players%20daily%20across%20all%20platforms.)
* League of Legends has over 128M monthly active users and over 11M peak players in a day, as of March 2022. - [ActivePlayer](https://activeplayer.io/league-of-legends/)

### Metaverse and AR/VR Data

##### The Metaverse is the current hottest topic among Big Tech companies. Whether using your Voice to control the AR/VR environment around you or to communicate with a friend, it is a necessary component in the Metaverse.

* Meta’s social VR platform Horizon has 300,000 monthly active users. - [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/17/22939297/meta-social-vr-platform-horizon-300000-users)
* Meta is building their own Voice Assistant specifically for the Metaverse. - [Vox](https://www.vox.com/recode/22948097/mark-zuckerberg-voice-assistant-metaverse-ai-announcement)
* Rec Room has 37M users as of December 2021, 450% higher than the previous year. - [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/20/rec-room-raises-145m-at-a-3-5b-valuation-for-its-user-generated-immersive-gaming-platform/)
* Other platforms like Mozilla and Microsoft have also recognized the opportunity that lies within the Metaverse and have created their own platforms, Hubs and Mesh. - [Mozilla](https://hubs.mozilla.com/), [Microsoft](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh)

## Challenges and Opportunities with Audio Data

The rise in audio data can lead to challenges like the cost of being able to moderate discussions happening on social media, as well as opportunities like being able to provide tools to create a more efficient customer service experience. Do you think there are any other challenges or opportunities that arise alongside the growth in Audio Data? Let us know your thoughts on Twitter [@SpeechlyAPI](https://twitter.com/SpeechlyAPI).

_Cover photo by Kristin Wilson on Unsplash_

How societal shifts at home and in the office are impacting the amount of audio data generated in 2022.

30 Data Points that Prove Audio Data is on the Rise


[Voice user interfaces](https://www.speechly.com/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/) allow users to interact with a computer system or application by using voice and speech commands. Voice user interfaces make use of speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies.

The obvious advantage of a voice user interface is that it allows a hands-free, distract-free way to use an application while still focusing most of their attention on another task. However, that's not the only or even the main advantage of a [well-designed voice user interface](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-application-design-guide/).

The main advantages of voice UIs include:

### Speed

According to a Standford study, speaking is at least four times faster than typing on a touch screen device. This makes voice a great input method for information heavy tasks, such as [filling complex form](https://www.speechly.com/blog/turn-any-web-form-into-a-voice-form/)s and [searching from a large inventory of items](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-search/).

### Intuitiveness

Even after using dozens of different email clients, finding certain rarely used features such as vacation responder or signature will be somewhat difficult on a new system. The user knows that the feature is somewhere, but it's impossible to know where it is before browsing through many different menus and options.

Voice, on the other hand is very different. The user can just say something like "change my signature" and they'll find the setting they are looking for immediately. Many cars already benefit from this kind of voice features and [over a third](https://www.statista.com/statistics/957808/us-consumers-using-automotive-voice-assistants-by-frequency/) of US driver's license holders use these features monthly.

### Flexibility

Voice user interfaces can support many ways of expressing the same thing. Let's get back to the vacation responder example mentioned before. The user might call the feature either Out of Office -message or a Vacation responder. If they are looking for a "Vacation responder" from the menus, they might miss the "Out of Office -responder" item even if they saw it.

The designer has to decide the name for the feature and stick with it. Some users will think it's the most natural name for that but some would prefer the other name. This is not the case with voice UIs.

A voice user interface can support dozens of synonyms and ways of expressing the same thing. No matter how the user expresses their wish, the user interface will react accordingly.

### Multi-tasking

Voice UIs enable the user to focus their attention on another task. This is especially useful when driving a car or [a forklift](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-picking/) as it improves safety and productivity.

It can also help users multitask inside an application. For example in gaming, players can change a camera or switch weapons without navigating in deep menus.

### Accessibility

While accessibility is essential for those suffering from various impairments, it is beneficial for all of us. Groups of people who can depend on voice features include people with disabilities that make the use of keyboard and mouse impossible, people with chronic conditions such as Repetitive Stress Injuries, who want to limit their use of keyboard and mouse, and people with cognitive disabilities.

Some examples of well-designed voice user interfaces include our [fashion eCommerce demo](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/) and

## Disadvantages of voice user interfaces

Voice user interfaces, especially when not implemented correctly, have some disadvantages, too. These disadvantages do not prevent the use of voice UIs, but they are something that a product team should be aware of.

### Privacy

People might not be willing to speak in public spaces because they are either being considerate towards others or due to privacy reasons.

Privacy might be an issue also because of the news regarding major tech companies and smart speakers. While this is not an issue with voice UIs as such, it is something that should be taken into account by being as open as possible with how the user data is being handled.

### Personal preferences

Some users may not like talking to a computer or just prefer texting. These preferences can be static or context-dependent. For example, a user might prefer texting over voice when searching for health-related information but prefer voice when searching for hotels.

### Not suitable for all user tasks

While voice can be the fastest and most suitable interaction modality for many user tasks, it's not a silver bullet for all user tasks. Selecting an item from a list of a few is probably easiest by using touch and drawing is most certainly easier with a mouse or touch. Voice on the other hand, is especially great for selecting from a large inventory of items and inputting information-heavy data such as most forms.

## Multi-modality and combining GUI and VUI

One important goal of a product owner or a designer is to make the product or application as easy and intuitive to use as possible by leveraging all relevant technologies and design methodologies.

Adding voice as one tool in the toolbox can yield good results. Voice should not be added to the product because it can be done but rather, because it is the best way to solve certain user tasks.

Just like voice-only is rarely the best way to approach a design problem, most often it's not GUI-only either. A touch screen with a voice modality is a great combination for creating [efficient and easy-to-use user interfaces](/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/).

Most applications can leverage voice modality in some features. Most applications will also need a screen. GUI and VUI should not be seen as alternatives, but rather as enhancements that can improve each other.

One of the biggest problems with smart speakers is the lack of a touch screen. That's why selecting an item on a smart speaker is very cumbersome.

GUIs on the other hand have some other deficiencies. As the screen real estate is limited, new features are either hidden behind nested menus or the UI gets cluttered with buttons. And to put it bluntly, [GUIs are not human-compatible](https://www.wired.com/1993/06/1-6-guis/). Even if we have kind of gotten used to them, there's nothing intuitive or easy in many common GUI design patterns such as hamburger menus or double-clicking.

We at Speechly are proponents of efficient user interfaces. We think that a user interface should be designed to be powerful tools that help users achieve their goals quickly. This is especially important with applications that are used often – and most product owners know that retaining users are the holy grail of any successful application.

If the user knows what they want to achieve, they can most probably say it out loud faster than they can browse through menus and click buttons. Especially so if what they are trying to achieve is information-heavy. Think of something like purchasing weekly [groceries](/blog/grocery-ecommerce-user-experience/): searching and selecting repeatedly is slow compared to just saying out loud all the items you want to add to your shopping cart.

### Full-duplex data processing

Human brains process information in two distinct systems: visuo-spatial system that's in charge of visual and spatial information and a linguistic system that takes care of speech information.

Because these systems are different, it's rather easy to drive a car and speak at the same time. When doing it, we simply employ both of these systems.

However, it's not possible to do two things at the same time in either of these systems. This is why it's not smart to drive a car and text simultaneously and a discussion where two people are talking simultaneously is next to impossible to follow.

A graphical user interface without voice features or a voice-only user interface such as a smart speaker is limited by this. If a user asks something from a smart speaker, they'll have to wait patiently until the smart speaker has finished answering. This is especially cumbersome if the answer is lengthy. If they could ask something and see the answer on their screen, they could immediately start refining the question.

## Examples

Examples on how [multi-modal voice user interfaces](/blog/bring-multimodality-voice-commerce/) leveraging the best parts of traditional graphical user interfaces and voice features can be seen below.

**Voice search in eCommerce**

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

**Voice forms**

<YouTube videoId="XWqHV1a32LM" />

If you want to try out the fashion demo yourself, you can access the demo [here](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/)

## Conclusions

Voice can improve user experience and make human-computer interaction more efficient. However, it should not be thought of as an alternative to current graphical user interfaces, but rather as an enhancement for those.

Combining the best part of graphical user interfaces and voice user interfaces enables efficient, intuitive, and easy-to-use user interfaces while not sacrificing anything from the current user interface.

By using real-time Spoken Language Understanding API such as Speechly, designers can enhance their current user interfaces with voice functionalities. Speechly can be applied to any industry or domain and with our design guidelines and developer support, teams can build awesome user experiences in a short time.

If you are interested in improving your current applications' user experience, [leave your email address](https://www.speechly.com/contact) and our industry specialist will contact you as soon as possible.


Voice has certain advantages over traditional user interfaces. Leveraging these advantages can create unique user experiences in any industry or domain.

Advantages of Voice User Interfaces


Voice Commerce, or V-Commerce, is a topic that comes up frequently when discussing the opportunities with voice technology. This is not surprising due to the fact that voice technology news frequently predicts that V-Commerce will be an [$80B opportunity](https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/22/amazon-google-win-voice-commerce-market.aspx) by 2023. For everyday users of voice technology, this may seem optimistic when you think of all the different challenges that face V-Commerce experiences today. Given these challenges, I believe companies will need to embrace Multi-Modal Voice Commerce, or voice experiences that go alongside existing Digital Experiences.

## Challenges Facing Voice Commerce Today

With any emerging technology there is bound to be problems, or opportunities, that come along with it. Voice technology is no different. There are a handful of recurring problems that arise with voice technology in general and these problems are usually magnified when applied to V-Commerce. Three common problems that users reference within V-Commerce are the actual lack of a screen, fear of being misunderstood, and concerns with privacy.

### Lack of Screen

A common complaint from users that try different V-Commerce experiences is the [fact](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2542583/Scientists-record-fastest-time-human-image-takes-just-13-milliseconds.html) that many voice-enabled devices do not have a screen. Without a screen to give users a sense of comfort that their utterances are being understood and executed properly, it’s hard to imagine purchases being made outside of basic everyday items and reorders.

#### Problems with Accuracy

Another common problem with V-Commerce is the users' fear of being misunderstood. Frequent users of voice enabled experiences are ok with a voice assistant that is unable to understand them when asking simple requests like answers to a question or song request. However, the risk of being misunderstood while making a financial transaction is likely to be more heavily scrutinized by users.

#### Privacy Issues

The final problem I want to address that comes up frequently with V-Commerce is privacy. [According to Voicebot](https://voicebot.ai/2020/05/11/privacy-concerns-rise-significantly-as-1-in-3-consumers-cite-it-as-reason-to-avoid-smart-speakers/), ⅓ of U.S. adults are concerned about smart speakers recording them and will not purchase a device, double the amount of 2018. Set aside potential smart speakers owners, there are also heightened concerns around privacy coming from existing smart speaker owners. Just like user fear of being misunderstood, privacy concerns with V-Commerce are heightened due to the fact that it revolves around a financial transaction.

Many of these problems can be better addressed with the addition of a screen to a voice experience creating Multi-Modal Voice Commerce. First, I will discuss a few general reasons why I think Multi-Modal Voice Commerce is the future of V-Commerce. I will then go into why I think businesses interested in creating valuable end user voice experiences should ditch smart speakers and start building voice features in their own digital domains.

## 3 Reasons for Multi-Modal Voice Commerce

### Buying is Visual

Humans have always looked for ways to improve how we transact and trade. We have progressed from making and trading our own goods, to Main Street mom-and-pop businesses, to large scale retail enterprises, to immersive E-Commerce stores. Although humans have consistently innovated how we purchase products, one variable that has also remained consistent is the visual component of purchasing goods. Humans are skeptical and it’s human nature to want to see and better scrutinize an object we are interested in purchasing. Another interesting fact, we process visual information in a fraction of the time compared to other modalities.

This observation gives E-Commerce oriented businesses an opportunity to lean into and leverage existing digital assets to create voice experiences. Product teams spend countless hours optimizing and perfecting both mobile and web experiences where customers are already spending time. By going all in on voice assistants as a Voice Commerce strategy, you leave out a major part of what makes online stores successful: images. Rather, businesses should enhance their current online stores by leveraging the voice modality and give customers a truly value-add experience.

#### Real-Time Validation

Most voice experiences today, even Multi-Modal experiences on popular Voice Assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant that show a transcript of what you are saying, are [turn-based experiences](https://www.speechly.com/blog/why-smart-speakers-are-not-the-future-of-voice/) and lack real time validation that the user is actually being understood. When I say “turn-based experience” I define it as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to produce a transcription of what was said followed by Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the intent of the user. The real opportunity with Multi-Modal Voice Commerce relies on Spoken Language Understanding (SLU).

Spoken Language Understanding is slightly different from the turn based approach I mentioned above, but can lead to a drastically different experience for users. SLU does ASR and NLP simultaneously in real-time. This allows for users not only to see an actual transcript of what they are saying, but also allows for a designer to take advantage of a screen to illustrate whether or not the system is understanding the users intents in real-time. This leads to comfort for the user knowing that they are being understood, but also results in longer utterances.

Multi-Modal Voice Commerce also allows for user validation on whether or not they are being listened to. With privacy being a top concern of both potential voice technology users and existing users, Product teams need to pay careful attention to how they address privacy. Using visual components, such as a [Microphone On/Off button](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-application-design-guide/), are a good remedy for privacy concerns with voice technology.

#### Efficient for Users

According to a study from [Stanford](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/08/24/stanford-study-speech-recognition-faster-texting/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe%20knew%20speech%20recognition%20is,who%20helped%20run%20the%20experiments.), speech recognition is 3x faster than typing into a smartphone. There have been many predictions on what voice experiences might become in the future, and I am as excited as everyone else about that future, but there is one absolute fact about voice technology. Voice is the most efficient way to interact with technology. This makes existing digital experiences, such as E-Commerce websites and mobile applications, the perfect domain for a Voice User Interface. Users are able to make purchase decisions based on products they can actually see, but are able to do things such as [search, filter](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-search/), and checkout more efficiently with a Multi-Modal Voice Interface.

## Invest: Multi-Modal Voice Interface vs. Voice Assistant Platforms

There is a difference between Voice Assistant platforms, such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, and companies like Speechly that enable developers to easily embed Voice User Interfaces in existing websites and apps. When it comes to building voice technology that is useful for users in E-Commerce, I believe it is better to approach voice as a modality to build immersive Multi-Modal experiences rather than an emerging platform opportunity. Approaching voice technology through this lens first provides the opportunity to immediately build features with value by bringing efficiency to your users.

See our Voice Search & Filtering Demo below:

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

### Plant the Voice Tech Seed

Starting with a V-Commerce use case like the Search and Filtering Demo above not only provides immediate value to users, but also plants the seed for future innovation around Multi-Modal Voice Interfaces. Searching or filtering products using your voice may seem simple in nature, but do not underestimate the power of user behavior change. With any user behavior change comes massive opportunities for innovation. Giving users a feature that is easy to digest and provides immediate value gives Product teams the opportunity to offer more sophisticated features down the line.

V-Commerce may have its problems, but I believe many of these problems are less concerning if we approach voice technology as a modality to build efficient Multi-Modal experiences. Multi-Modal Voice Commerce allows companies and brands that are interested in voice technology to “Walk before they run” by starting with features that make sense to users and make the purchase journey more efficient. Giving customers true value through voice technology, from day 1, is the only way to lay the foundation for building more sophisticated voice experiences in the future.

If you are interested in turning your E-Commerce store into a Voice Commerce powerhouse, [leave your email address](https://www.speechly.com/contact) and our industry professional will contact you.


Voice commerce should not mean eCommerce on a smart speaker, but rather a multi-modal experience supported by voice.

Bring Multi-Modality to Voice Commerce


New with Speechly? Please take a look at [Quick start](https://docs.speechly.com/quick-start/) to learn how to get started or see our [Integrations](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/) documentation for simple integration tutorials!

### Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Training and testing the application at the Speechly Dashboard
3. Creating the project structure
4. Connecting the application to the Speechly API
5. Conclusion

## 1. Introduction

The goal of this blog post is to show how you can add voice user interface to any web application. As an example, we will be building a simple image editing web application that can be used by voice. You can see the application in action at [https://speechly.github.io/photo-editor-demo/](https://speechly.github.io/photo-editor-demo/) and the source code at [https://github.com/speechly/photo-editor-demo](https://github.com/speechly/photo-editor-demo).

More specifically, in this tutorial, you learn how to:

- Use the Speechly dashboard: to configure intents and entities that Speechly’s Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology extracts.
- Use React and Speechly [browser client](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/web-client/) to implement a simple front-end that uses the intents and entities sent by the Speechly API. In this tutorial we use React, but the Speechly browser-client implementation is the same, whatever [front-end framework](https://www.bluecoding.com/) you are using.

Let’s start with the most fun part and configure the Speechly application.

## 2. Training and testing the application at the Speechly dashboard

First of all, you will need access to the Speechly dashboard. You can get access by joining the waitlist.

Next, you can proceed by creating a new application. You start by naming it, and choosing the language. For the “Template”, choose “Empty”, and for the “ASR Biasing”, choose “Moderate”. Now click “Create” to proceed to the configuration view.

![Creating new application in Speechly](dashboard-new-app-view.png 'Speechly dashboard new app view')

In the configuration view, let’s start by adding the Speechly Annotation Language (SAL) templates to the configuration. You can read more about the SAL by visiting our [documentation](https://docs.speechly.com/slu-examples/editing-slu-examples/#introduction).

Let’s add the following features to our editor:

1. Adding and removing filters
2. Changing the visual properties of the image such as brightness and contrast
3. Reversing the last command

In our simple photo editor, a filter is something that is either “on” or “off”, while properties such as brightness have a numeric value that can be increased or decreased. These features could thus be mapped to the following intents:

1. *add_filter and *remove_filter
2. *increase and *decrease
3. \*undo

Since there are multiple options for filters, let’s take a `filter` entity in use. Similarly, there are several properties whose value can be changed; therefore, we’ll also add a `property` entity.

For the filters, let’s add the following SAL templates to our configuration:

```speechlySal
filter = [vintage|faded|sepia|classic|kodachrome|technicolor|polaroid|black and white|grayscale]
add_filter_cmd = [add | activate | make it | make it look | make it like]
del_filter_cmd = [remove | deactivate]
…

*add_filter $add_filter_cmd $filter(filter)
*remove_filter $del_filter_cmd $filter(filter)
```

The variable `filter` refers to a list of names for different filters. The variables `add_filter_cmd` and `del_filter_cmd` are lists of commands, which can be used for adding or removing filters to an image. The utterance `*add_filter $add_filter_cmd $filter(filter)` combines the both lists. Users could say, for example, “Make it look classic” or “Activate black and white” to have this intent detected. `$filter(filter)` has its entity name in parentheses, which enables the Speechly API to recognize “vintage” as an entity value of “filter” when the user says “Make it look vintage.” Upon receiving the utterance, the API returns both the `add_filter` intent as well as the `filter` entity with value `vintage`. With this information, our future application can add the desired filter effects to the image.

For changing the values of the image properties, we can go with the following templates:

```speechlySal
property = [brightness | luminosity | light | contrast | saturation | color]
increase_cmd = [increase|add more|more]
decrease_cmd = [decrease|reduce|less]
…

*increase $increase_cmd $property(property)
*decrease $decrease_cmd $property(property)
```

Here we define the changeable properties in the `property` variable and the commands to adjust those properties in the variables `increase_cmd` and `decrease_cmd`. Then we combine them into utterances, which allow us to detect the `*increase` and `*decrease` intents as well as the `property` entity when a user says phrases like “Increase saturation” or “Decrease contrast”.

The last intent is “undo”, and it is quite straightforward:

```speechlySal
*undo [go back | go one step back | undo | i don't want that | no i don't want that | cancel that | cancel]
```

When a user says one of those commands, the `*undo` intent can be detected. Since we don’t have any parameters for the undo action, we don’t need to add any entities.

Let’s put it all together now:

```speechlySal
filter = [vintage|faded|sepia|classic|kodachrome|technicolor|polaroid|black and white|grayscale]
property = [brightness | luminosity | light | contrast | saturation | color]
increase_cmd = [increase|add more|more]
decrease_cmd = [decrease|reduce|less]
add_filter_cmd = [add | activate | make it | make it look | make it like]
del_filter_cmd = [remove | deactivate]

*undo [go back | go one step back | undo | i don't want that | no i don't want that | cancel that | cancel]

*add_filter $add_filter_cmd $filter(filter)
*remove_filter $del_filter_cmd $filter(filter)

*increase $increase_cmd $property(property)
*decrease $decrease_cmd $property(property)

*increase $increase_cmd $property(property) {and} *increase $increase_cmd $property(property)
*decrease $decrease_cmd $property(property) {and} *decrease $decrease_cmd $property(property)
*increase $increase_cmd $property(property) {and} *decrease $decrease_cmd $property(property)
*decrease $decrease_cmd $property(property) {and} *increase $increase_cmd $property(property)
*add_filter $add_filter_cmd $filter(filter) {and} *increase $increase_cmd $property(property)
*add_filter $add_filter_cmd $filter(filter) {and} *decrease $decrease_cmd $property(property)
*increase $increase_cmd $property(property) {and} *add_filter $add_filter_cmd $filter(filter)
*decrease $decrease_cmd $property(property) {and} *add_filter $add_filter_cmd $filter(filter)
```

Once you’ve added the SAL templates, including all the intents and entities, to the configuration, you can click “Deploy” to start deploying your Speechly application. It may take a while, but once it’s ready, you can try it out in the Speechly Playground by clicking the “Try” button.

In the playground, you should verify that you get the correct intents and entities - at least for those utterances that you have defined in your configuration. Should you not get desired results, try speaking with a different speed (avoid too slow and too fast tempo), and make sure that your microphone is working properly.

Feel free to modify the configuration, but make sure you use the same intent and entity names we defined here.

## 3. Creating the project structure

This tutorial uses [React](https://reactjs.org/) for building the application, but the [Speechly browser-client](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/web-client/) can be used with other Javascript frameworks or vanilla javascript too. So please keep reading even if you are not familiar with [React](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/react/)! The tutorial will be useful even also if you plan to use some other framework.

Let’s create our React application:

```bash
npm install -g create-react-app
create-react-app speechly-image-editor --template typescript
cd speechly-image-editor
```

Now, let’s add our dependencies:

```bash
npm install --save @speechly/browser-client
npm install --save fabric // for the image manipulation operations
```

To save some time, here’s a pre-built code to our app:

```bash
cd src/
curl -o Mic.tsx https://raw.githubusercontent.com/speechly/photo-editor-demo/master/src/Mic.tsx
curl -o ConnectionContext.tsx https://raw.githubusercontent.com/speechly/photo-editor-demo/master/src/ConnectionContext.tsx
curl -o CanvasEditor.ts https://raw.githubusercontent.com/speechly/photo-editor-demo/master/src/CanvasEditor.ts
curl -o layout.css https://raw.githubusercontent.com/speechly/photo-editor-demo/master/src/layout.css
```

**Mic.tsx** is the microphone component that listens to the audio in the browser, **ConnectionContext.tsx** is the component that handles the connection to the Speechly API, **CanvasEditor.ts** is a minimal image editor, and **layout.css** contains the styling for the application. Feel free to check them out for the implementation details!

## 4. Connecting the application to the Speechly API

Let’s start by adding the following code to **src/App.tsx**:

```js
import React, { useEffect, useRef, useState } from 'react';
import './layout.css';
import { Mic } from './Mic';
import { CanvasEditor } from './CanvasEditor';
import ConnectionContext, {
  ConnectionContextProvider,
} from './ConnectionContext';

const App = () => {
  const imageEditorRef = useRef<HTMLDivElement>(null);
  const transcriptDivRef = useRef<HTMLDivElement>(null);
  const [imageEditorInstance, setImageEditorInstance] =
    useState<CanvasEditor>();
  const [imagePath, setImagePath] = useState<string>();
  const appId = process.env.REACT_APP_APP_ID;
  if (!appId) {
    throw new Error('REACT_APP_APP_ID environment variable is undefined!');
  }
  const language = process.env.REACT_APP_LANGUAGE;
  if (!language) {
    throw new Error('REACT_APP_LANGUAGE environment variable is undefined!');
  }
  // create image editor here
  return (
    <div>
      <section className="photo">
        <div ref={imageEditorRef} />
      </section>
      <section className="app">
        <div ref={transcriptDivRef} />
      </section>

      <section className="controls">Microphone here</section>
    </div>
  );
};

export default App;
```

`REACT_APP_APP_ID` and `REACT_APP_LANGUAGE` are the environment variables, which are used as your Speechly app ID and your chosen language. You can find your app ID and language code in the Speechly dashboard, where you configured your app in chapter 1.

You can run the application with the correct app id and language like this:

```bash
$ export REACT_APP_APP_ID="your-app-id"
$ export REACT_APP_LANGUAGE="en-US"
$ npm run start
```

Next, let’s create an instance of the image editor. Add the following code to the App function, just before its return statement:

```js
const [width, height] = useWindowSize();
useEffect(() => {
  if (!imageEditorInstance && imagePath) {
    const editor = new CanvasEditor(
      imageEditorRef.current as HTMLDivElement,
      imagePath as string,
    );
    setImageEditorInstance(editor);
  }
}, [imageEditorRef, imagePath, imageEditorInstance]);
```

It does not yet have any effect, because the _imagePath_ is not initialized. To keep things simple, just add an image to the public*/* folder and use the image name as the initial value for _imagePath_.

```js
const [imagePath, setImagePath] = useState<string>('pic.jpg');
```

In this example _pic.jpg_ refers to the image in _public/pic.jpg_.

Let’s then add the microphone to the page, and connect it to the Speechly API. The connection is handled by the Speechly [browser client](https://www.speechly.com/docs/client-libraries/web-client/) library. You can check [browser-client-example](https://github.com/speechly/browser-client-example) repo for a simple example on how to use the Speechly browser client.

Let’s save us some more time and get more pre-built code:

```bash
curl -o speechlyTools.ts https://raw.githubusercontent.com/speechly/photo-editor-demo/master/src/speechlyTools.ts
```

This file contains the mappings between the SAL intents and the image editor actions. Let’s take a more detailed look at the `updateImageEditorBySegmentChange` function.

This function is triggered every time the app receives a response from the Speechly API, for instance, when the API detects a new intent or entity in the voice input; or simply, when a user utters a new word. The voice input is divided into _segments_. A segment encapsulates related words, intents and entities in the speech until the point in time the user stops speaking or proceeds to express a new intent. For example, the utterance “Make it look vintage, and decrease the brightness” is split into two segments:“Make it look vintage” and “decrease the brightness”. You can find out more about segments in the [documentation](https://docs.speechly.com/speechly-api/). For our image editing application, we are specifically interested in the intents and the entities that define which actions we want to execute.

Now, let’s take a look at the code in `updateImageEditorBySegmentChange`. It checks whether the segment is not going to change anymore (isFinal), and calls one of the imageEditor functions, depending on the user intent.

For example, if `intent.intent === "add_filter",` we need to find and apply a filter. To find out which filter needs to be applied, we can check the entity values in that segment:

```js
const collectEntity = (entityList, entityType: string) => {
       const entities = entityList.filter(item => item.type === entityType);
       if (entities.length > 0) {
           // In our case there should only be a single entity of a given type in a segment,
           // so we just return the first item on the list if it exists.
           return entities[0].value.toLowerCase();
       }
       return '';
   }
…
// filter name can be vintage, faded, sepia…
const filterName = this.collectEntity(segment.entities, "filter");
```

Then we need to verify that we can handle the requested filter. For example, “black and white” is called “grayscale” in the image editor, so we use `entity2canonical` mapping to look it up. After that we call the enableFilter function of the image editor, and the filter is applied!

```js
if (filterName in this.entity2canonical) {
  imageEditor.enableFilter(this.entity2canonical[filterName]);
}
```

Similarly, when `intent.intent === "increase", `we call `incrementProperty` function of the image editor to change the property value. To find out which property the user wants to change, we use the property entity:

```js
const propertyName = this.collectEntity(segment.entities, 'property');
```

There are also specific conditions for `remove_filter` and `decrease` intents.

Now, let’s replace the “Microphone here” placeholder in src/App.tsx with the following code:

```js
<ConnectionContextProvider
  appId={appId}
  language={language}
  imageEditor={imageEditorInstance as CanvasEditor}
  transcriptDiv={transcriptDivRef.current as HTMLDivElement}
>
  <ConnectionContext.Consumer>
    {({ stopContext, startContext, closeClient, clientState }) => {
      return (
        <div>
          <Mic
            onUp={stopContext}
            onDown={startContext}
            onUnmount={closeClient}
            clientState={clientState}
            classNames="Playground__mic"
          />
        </div>
      );
    }}
  </ConnectionContext.Consumer>
</ConnectionContextProvider>
```

Now you should be able to launch the app by using your own Speechly app ID and see the page with an image and the microphone button.

Try using the same utterances you used in chapter 1 in the Speechly playground.

You can say, for example:

- make it black and white
- add technicolor
- add more light

## 5. Conclusion

In this blog post, we walked you through how to set up a photo editor web application that can be controlled by voice, with the help of the Speechly SLU and React. We configured the application in the Speechly dashboard using the SAL, deployed it, and tried it out in the Speechly playground. We then put together our own simple image editor. You can take a look at the [live ](https://speechly.github.io/photo-editor-demo)demo and the [source code](https://github.com/speechly/photo-editor-demo) of this app for more details. Feel free to contact Speechly support at hello@speechly.com if you have any questions!


Are you thinking, how to use Speechly in your system? In this tutorial we build a simple web-based image editor with a voice user interface.

Building a Web Application with a Voice User Interface


The world of AR/VR, Gaming, and Metaverse experiences continues to grow, so we are excited to release our Speechly Client Library for Unity. This release is the result of growing demand for being able to easily add a Real-Time Voice UI as a Feature to these experiences to make them more interactive and easier to navigate.

## How it Works

This client library streams audio from a Unity or .NET app to the Speechly cloud Voice API and provides a C# API for receiving real-time Speech-to-Text (STT) transcription and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) results. This makes it easy to enable users to Command and Control the environment around them using their Voice.

Check out the [Speechly Client for Unity](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/usage/?platform=Unity) in the Speechly Documentation to start developing your voice-enabled gaming or metaverse experience today. For more technical details, check out our [GitHub repository](https://github.com/speechly/speechly-unity-dotnet).

## See it in Action

<YouTube videoId="1gfrjOl7cgs" />

## What is Speechly?

Speechly is a Voice API that makes it easy to build voice features into games, AR/VR/XR experiences, mobile apps and websites. If you would like to learn more about Speechly or get access to our API, you can [sign up](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/#/signup) for a free account or reach out to us [here](https://www.speechly.com/contact).

With the Speechy Client Library for Unity, developers can now easily add Voice UIs as a Feature to their experiences built with Unity.

Client Library for Unity to Easily Add Voice Command & Control


Speechly offers fast and intuitive development tools for voice user interfaces on the platform most familiar to all developers – command line. You can find the GitHub repository for the tools [here](https://github.com/speechly/cli/)

<YouTube videoId="ylAXdhOGwDs" />

This tutorial shows you how you can prototype and develop voice user interfaces in the command line.

Benefits of command line interface include:

- Easy integration to any workflow including your favorite code editor tools
- Easy collaboration with version control tools like Git
- Actions easy to replicate on any machine
- Fast user interface

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can create and test your first Speechly application on the command line.

## 1 Download speechly command line tool for your platform

### Homebrew (for Mac OS)

If you are using Mac OS, use [Homebrew](https://brew.sh/) to install speechly with:

```bash
$ brew tap speechly/tap
# to get the latest release
$ brew install speechly
```

After tapping, normal brew updates will include any new versions of speechly.

### Scoop (for Windows)

[Scoop](https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop) is a package manager for Windows. speechly can be installed with scoop with:

```bash
$scoop bucket add speechly https://github.com/speechly/scoop-bucket
# to install the latest release
$scoop install speechly
```

You can update the tool with:

```bash
$scoop update
```

## 2 Sign up and get your API token

To authenticate against the Speechly API, you’ll need an API token. You can get your API token from the [Speechly Dashboard](https://www.speechly.com/dashboard/)

Sign up (or login, if you are already a Speechly user) and go to Project settings on the top right navigation. Click Create API token and give it a name.

**NOTE**: After you navigate away from this page, you can’t see the token anymore for security reasons. If you lose your token, you’ll need to create a new one.

## 3 Create a directory for our application

Now that we have the required tools installed, let’s create an empty directory for our application. This directory will contain the required configuration files.

### MacOS

```bash
$ mkdir my-first-speechly-app && cd my-first-speechly-app
```

### Windows

```bash
$ md my-first-speechly-app
$ cd my-first-speechly-app
```

## 4 Authenticate to your project

```bash
$ speechly config add --name new --apikey <YOUR_API_TOKEN>
```

Using this command will create a new application called “new” and authenticates by using your API token that we created in the second step of this tutorial.

## 5 Create an application inside your project

Our current project doesn’t have any applications, so let’s create the first one. We need to specify the application name with the flag `-n` and the language with the flag `-l`. Let’s use en-US as the language.

```bash
$ speechly create -n home-automation -l en-US
```

The command replies with the app ID of your newly created application. Copy this string to the clipboard.

**NOTE**: You can use `$ speechly list` to list your applications and to get your app ID.

![Listing applications on command line interface](list-of-applications-cli.png)

## 6 Download a working configuration YAML file

Because actually configuring a Speechly application is outside the scope of this tutorial, we’ll be using a ready-made home automation template. Let’s download the file.

**NOTE**: if you are interested in reading more about configuring your application, refer to the Speechly documentation

```bash
$ curl https://docs.speechly.com/home-automation.yaml -o home-automation-curl.yaml
```

## 7 Use the configuration file to configure your application

As you can see with the `$ speechy list` command, our application status is currently `STATUS_UNSPECIFIED` as it doesn’t have valid configuration. Let’s fix that by using the configuration file.

```bash
$ speechly deploy . -a <YOUR APP ID>
```

This command uses the YAML file in your current directory. This should be the YAML file we just downloaded.

We can check the current status of the application by using `describe`. If you use the `-w` flag, you will get real-time information about the status of the deployment.

```bash
$ speechly describe -w <YOUR APP ID
```

After waiting for about 83 seconds, the application has been deployed. Yay! You have configured your first Speechly application by using the command line!

You can verify this by using `speechly list` and your application should now have a status `STATUS_TRAINED`

## 8 Test your application

Now you can test the application by using the Speechly Playground! You can sign in to the Dashboard and see your application in the list.

![Listing applications on web interface](list-of-applications.png)

Try saying something like “Turn off the living room lights” or “Turn on the TV in kitchen”.

For more information on using the Dashboard, see our [Quick Start](https://www.speechly.com/docs/quick-start/)


We have released a set of command line tools that improve collaboration and makes it easy for developers to integrate Speechly to their current workflow

Configuring and Testing Voice UIs on Command Line


Google Assistant first broke out of the phone and into the home via the Smart Speaker in [2016](https://www.androidpolice.com/google-shutting-down-assistant-conversational-actions-app-actions-for-android/), following the Made by Google event. They also opened up access to 3rd party developers to build Conversational Actions for the smart speakers they released.

Conversational Actions, also known as Google Actions or Voice Apps, will [“sunset” or shutdown](https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset) in 1 year, on June 13, 2023. This will effectively end the development of 3rd party voice experiences on smart speakers and smart displays.

## What does this mean for Voice Tech at Google?

Developers of Conversational Actions are [being encouraged by Google](https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/06/Helping-Developers-Create-Meaningful-Voice-Interactions-with-Android.html) to transition their Voice Apps into Android Apps which they can then Voice-Enable using App Actions with Android. App Actions enable users to say voice commands to quickly access Android App functionality. This is powered by Google Assistant’s intent mapping and Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

Google is also moving from “Voice First” to a “Voice Forward” narrative. This appears to be shifting their strategy around Voice Tech to be less conversational and more on getting tasks done by taking advantage of Voice alongside the screens found with many Android Devices. In the blog post covering [Creating Voice Apps for Android](https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/06/Helping-Developers-Create-Meaningful-Voice-Interactions-with-Android.html) Rebecca Nathenson, Director of Product Management writes, “Whether someone asks Assistant to start a workout, order food, or schedule a grocery pickup, we know users are looking for ways to get things done more naturally using voice.”. There is a focus on getting things done by Voice and not on starting a conversation - a juxtaposition from the “Voice First” narrative that has dominated the headlines for years.


## Why is the Shutdown of Conversational Actions happening?

The [Google Developers blog](https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/06/Helping-Developers-Create-Meaningful-Voice-Interactions-with-Android.html) continues and gives further background on why Conversational Actions are being shutdown. Nathenson writes, “While Conversational Actions were an excellent way to experiment with voice, the ecosystem has evolved significantly over the last 5 years and we’ve heard some important feedback: users want to engage with their favorite apps using voice, and developers want to build upon their existing investments in Android. In response to that feedback, we’ve decided to focus our efforts on making App Actions with Android the best way for developers to create deeper, more meaningful voice-forward experiences.”

Bret Kinsella of Voicebot.ai also [spoke on this topic](https://voicebot.ai/2022/06/13/google-assistant-actions-voice-apps-to-sunset-focus-shifts-to-android-apps/) saying, “This transition has been in process since at least Google I/O 2019 whether that was widely recognized or not. It was clear then that Google Actions were being subordinated within the Android ecosystem and that all of the incentives and organizational structure would drive an Android-first approach. This was bound to leave voice app developers in a difficult spot…”.


## Validation of Voice UI as a Feature vs Conversational Voice UIs

At Speechly, we have built our technology from the ground up to support [Voice UIs as a Feature](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-uis-as-a-feature-vs-conversational-voice-uis) in Mobile and Web experiences vs the traditional Conversational Voice UI experience you find with Voice Assistants. We have always believed that Voice UIs as a Feature are an [inevitable step](https://www.speechly.com/blog/the-inevitability-of-voice-ui-features) in the [Evolution of UIs](https://www.speechly.com/blog/evolution-of-uis), before we will see Voice Assistants take root. Right now, Voice Features are delivering the most value in [Mobile Apps](https://www.speechly.com/blog/the-fastest-ui-for-the-web-and-mobile) and will continue to do so until Voice UIs become an expected modality for users.

It's great to see that Big Tech companies like Google, who have made massive investments in assistants, are realizing this. Voice UIs are at their best when adding efficiency in getting things done. This is only hindered by forcing users into a back and forth conversation with their technology.


## How can Android Developers easily Voice-Enable their Mobile App?

With the [Speechly API Android Client](https://github.com/speechly/android-client), Mobile App developers can easily build responsive, voice-enabled applications. With just a few lines of code you can add [Voice UI Features](https://www.speechly.com/demos) to your application such as Voice Search, Filtering, Form Filling, Input, or Command & Control.

If you are an Android Developer interested in Voice-Enabling your application, check out the [Speechly API Android Client on Github](https://github.com/speechly/android-client).

If you have a new use case in mind or need help Voice-Enabling your Android Application, reach out to the Speechly Team on our [Contact Us page](https://www.speechly.com/contact).


_Cover photo by Thomas Kolnowski on Unsplash_

Google Actions, or Voice Apps, will be shutdown as of 2023 while Google encourages developers to Voice-Enable Android Apps.

Conversational Actions Shutdown and Shift Focus to Voice UI in Android Mobile Apps


Online video chat applications are used by millions of people every day. Many times it would be handy to go back to what somebody might have said earlier, yet quite few video chat applications offer real-time transcription.

In this tutorial we'll learn how to create a WebRTC video chat application that transcribes the users’ speech in real-time using the Speechly Browser Client. We'll also cover how to use a `MediaStream` instead of the users’ microphone as well as how to use our new VAD (Voice Activity Detector) feature for a completely hands-free experience.

This guide uses vanilla JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The same core concepts apply whether you choose to use React, Vue or any other framework.

## Step 1: Creating a WebRTC Video Chat

This guide uses [Muaz Khan’s WebRTC Meeting](https://github.com/muaz-khan/WebRTC-Experiment/tree/master/meeting) example as a starting point. Kudos to him for making this available!

### Setup the project with the following files

```bash
speechly-webrtc/
├── index.html
├── style.css
└── main.js
```

### Create the basic scaffolding

In `index.html` create a basic HTML document and add the following content. It's very basic for now, we'll expand this later when adding more features.

```html
<div class="app">
  <div id="lobby" class="lobby">
    <h2>Start a meeting</h2>
    <button id="new-room">New meeting</button>
  </div>
  <div id="room" class="room">
    <div class="room-container">
      <div class="room-header">
        <h2 id="room-name"></h2>
        <button id="leave-room">Leave</button>
      </div>
      <div id="streams" class="room-streams"></div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>
```

### Link the libraries

In `index.html` add the following script tags before the closing `</body>` tag.

```html
<script src="https://webrtc.github.io/adapter/adapter-latest.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.webrtc-experiment.com/CodecsHandler.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.webrtc-experiment.com/IceServersHandler.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.webrtc-experiment.com/meeting.js"></script>
<script type="module" src="main.js"></script>
```

### Setup the video chat

In `main.js` start by setting up the meeting object and a few HTML elements

```js
const meeting = new Meeting();

const roomName = document.getElementById("room-name");
const streamsContainer = document.getElementById("streams");
const newRoomBtn = document.getElementById("new-room");
const leaveRoomBtn = document.getElementById("leave-room");
```

Handle adding of a new stream, placing yourself first

```js
meeting.onaddstream = function(e) {
  if (e.type == "local") streamsContainer.insertBefore(e.video, streamsContainer.firstChild);
  if (e.type == "remote") streamsContainer.appendChild(e.video);
};
```

Handle signaling using websocket

```js
meeting.openSignalingChannel = function(onmessage) {
  let channel = location.href.replace(/\/|:|#|%|\.|\[|\]/g, "");
  let websocket = new WebSocket("wss://muazkhan.com:9449/");
  websocket.onopen = function() {
    websocket.push(JSON.stringify({
      open: true,
      channel: channel
    }));
  };
  websocket.push = websocket.send;
  websocket.send = function(data) {
    if (websocket.readyState != 1) {
      return setTimeout(function() {
        websocket.send(data);
      }, 300);
    }
    websocket.push(JSON.stringify({
      data: data,
      channel: channel
    }));
  };
  websocket.onmessage = function(e) {
    onmessage(JSON.parse(e.data));
  };
  return websocket;
};
```

Handle users leaving the room

```js
meeting.onuserleft = function(userid) {
  let video = document.getElementById(userid);
  if (video) video.parentNode.removeChild(video);
};
```

Bind buttons for creating a new meeting and leaving the meeting

```js
newRoomBtn.onclick = function() {
  let name = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2, 10)
  meeting.setup(name);
  roomName.textContent = name
};

leaveRoomBtn.onclick = function() {
  meeting.leave();
  location.reload();
};
```

### Try it out

Start a local development server of your choice (i'm using the [Live Server](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ritwickdey.LiveServer) extension for Visual Studio Code) and view it in your browser.

On the newly created page go ahead start a new meeting. The browser will ask for permission to use your microphone and camera. Press **Allow** and you should have something like this running.

![video chat 1](speechly-webrtc-1.png)

### Showing/hiding of the meeting room and lobby

Now that the basic meeting is working, let's show/hide the lobby and meeting room as needed. Start by defining a few HTML elements along with a helper function.

```js
const meetingLobby = document.getElementById("lobby");
const meetingRoom = document.getElementById("room");

function setupMeetingRoom(roomid) {
  meetingLobby.style.display = "none";
  meetingRoom.style.display = "grid";
  roomName.textContent = roomid;
}
```

Then update the `newRoomBtn.onclick` event to use the new helper function.

```js
newRoomBtn.onclick = function() {
  let name = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2, 10)
  meeting.setup(name);
  setupMeetingRoom(name);
};
```

Then add some basic styles. Remember to import the style sheet by using `<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" />`.

```css
.app {
  font-family: sans-serif;
  position: absolute;
  top: 0;
  right: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  left: 0;
}

.lobby {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  justify-content: center;
  max-width: 300px;
  height: 100%;
  margin: auto;
}

.room {
  display: none;
  grid-template-columns: 2fr 1fr;
  height: 100%
}
```

Now the meeting room should be hidden by default and only the lobby should be visible. Once you join a meeting the lobby is hidden and the meeting room is shown.

## Step 2: Adding Speechly

Now that the basic video chat app is working, let's add the [Speechly Browser Client](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@speechly/browser-client) and start transcribing speech.

### Create a new Speechly application

Head over to the [Speechly Dashboard](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/), log in or create an account, and create a new application using the **Empty** template.

![dashboard new app](speechly-webrtc-2.png)

### Deploy the application

Since we're interested in transcribing speech, there's no need for us to write any SAL configuration. Just hit **Deploy** and copy the **App ID**, you'll need it shortly.

![dashboard deploy](speechly-webrtc-3.png)

### Integrate the Speechly Browser Client

In `main.js` import the Speechly Browser Client and create an instance of it.

```js
import { BrowserClient } from "//unpkg.com/@speechly/browser-client?module=true"

const speechly = new BrowserClient({
  appId: "YOUR-APPID-FROM-DASHBOARD",
  debug: true,
  logSegments: true,
  vad: {
    enabled: true,
    noiseGateDb: -24.0
  }
});
```

The VAD is one of our latest features and it's perfect for this case. It takes care of connecting/disconnecting to Speechly backend based on input levels to your microphone. It has a [lot more options](https://github.com/speechly/speechly/blob/main/libraries/browser-client/docs/interfaces/client.VadOptions.md) than shown here, but for now you just need to enable it and set a sensible threshold to get started.

Then in the `meeting.onaddstream` method, change the function to `async` and attach the `MediaStream` to the Speechly Browser Client. At the same go, hide the video controls since they aren't really that useful here.

```js
meeting.onaddstream = async function(e) {
  await speechly.attach(e.stream);
  e.video.controls = false;
  if (e.type == "local") streamsContainer.insertBefore(e.video, streamsContainer.firstChild);
  if (e.type == "remote") streamsContainer.appendChild(e.video);
};
```

Now when you start a meeting and open your console, you should see speech segments being logged!

### Showing the transcript in the UI

First create an element that will display the transcript, place it next to the `room-container` div.

```html
<div id="room" class="room">
  <div class="room-container">
    <div class="room-header">
      <h2 id="room-name"></h2>
      <button id="leave-room">Leave</button>
    </div>
    <div id="streams" class="room-streams"></div>
  </div>
  <div id="transcript" class="room-transcript"></div>
</div>
```

Then use the `onSegmentChange` method to listen to speech segments and show them in the newly created container once the segment is marked as `isFinal`. As the segment contains an array of uppercase words, they first need to be lower cased and then joined into a string.

```js
const transcriptContainer = document.getElementById("transcript");

speechly.onSegmentChange(segment => {
  if (segment && segment.isFinal) {
    let text = segment.words.map(w => w.value.toLowerCase()).join(" ");
    let div = document.createElement("div");
    div.textContent = text;
    transcriptContainer.appendChild(div);
  }
});
```

Then add a bit of styles to separate the segments from each other and make the transcript div scrollable.

```css
.room-container {
  padding: 32px;
}

.room-transcript {
  overflow-y: auto;
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  gap: 12px;
  background-color: #f5f5f5;
  padding: 32px;
}

.room-transcript div {
  background-color: #e5e5e5;
  padding: 10px 12px;
  line-height: 1.25;
}
```

### Optional: showing tentative segments

The above solution adds a segment to the transcript when the segment is marked as `isFinal`. If you wish to make the transcript even more real-time, you can show the tentative segment and keep on updating that until the segment is marked as `isFinal`.

```js
speechly.onSegmentChange(segment => {
  if (segment) {
    let text = segment.words.map(w => w.value.toLowerCase()).join(" ");

    let div = document.createElement("div");
    let id = segment.contextId + "-" + segment.id;
    div.id = id;

    let segmentDiv = document.getElementById(id);
    if (segmentDiv) segmentDiv.textContent = text;
    if (!segmentDiv) transcriptContainer.appendChild(div);

    if (segment.isFinal) {
      segmentDiv.textContent = text;
    }
  }
});
```

### Try it out

By now, you should have an video chat application that transcribes speech in real-time!

![video chat 2](speechly-webrtc-4.png)

## Step 3: Multiple Users in the Same Meeting

### Allowing others to join the meeting

First add a button for copying the current meeting id as well as a place for the joining user to input it.

```html
<div class="app">
  <div id="lobby" class="lobby">
    <h2>Start a meeting</h2>
    <button id="new-room">New meeting</button>
    <br/>
    <h2>Join a meeting</h2>
    <div class="lobby-join">
      <input type="text" id="meeting-room-id" placeholder="Meeting ID">
      <button id="join-room">Join</button>
    </div>
  </div>
  <div id="room" class="room">
    <div class="room-container">
      <div class="room-header">
        <h2 id="room-name"></h2>
        <button id="copy-room">Copy</button>
        <button id="leave-room">Leave</button>
      </div>
      <div id="streams" class="room-streams"></div>
    </div>
    <div id="transcript" class="room-transcript"></div>
  </div>
</div>
```

Then add two new methods, one for checking for created meeting rooms and for alerting for each new meeting. You'll also need to bind the two new buttons click events.

```js
const copyRoomBtn = document.getElementById("copy-room");
const joinRoomBtn = document.getElementById("join-room");

meeting.onmeeting = function(room) {
  if (!room) return

  joinRoomBtn.onclick = function() {
    let id = document.getElementById("meeting-room-id").value;
    if (id !== room.roomid) return
    meeting.meet(room)
    setupMeetingRoom(room.roomid)
  }
};

meeting.check();

copyRoomBtn.onclick = function() {
  navigator.clipboard.writeText(roomName.textContent)
}
```

In the `meeting.onmeeting` method we check if the inputted id matches any of the received meeting rooms. If it does, the user will join that meeting.

### Finishing touches

Now that multiple video streams appear in the room, they layout looks a bit off. Let's fix that by adjusting the header and displaying videos in a grid.

```css
.room-header {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  gap: 8px;
  margin-bottom: 32px;
}

.room-header h2 {
  margin: 0;
}

.room-streams {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(40%, 1fr));
  gap: 16px;
}
```

Users might join using their phone in which case their video will be most likely in portrait mode which causes a layout issue. Also, you might notice that your own video appears to be mirrored. Luckily there's an easy solution for both cases.

```css
video {
  object-fit: contain;
  background-color: #000;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  max-height: 70vh;
}

video#self {
  transform: rotateY(180deg);
}
```

The end result should look like this:

![video chat 3](speechly-webrtc-5.png)

### Caveat

While it's quite easy to support multiple participants in a meeting, this guide does not try to cover transcribing the speech of multiple participants. In a case where another user joins the meeting, the Speechly Browser Client will use the `MediaStream` of whoever joined the meeting last and display their transcript. If you wish to compile a transcript from all parties, the best way to go about this is to:

1. Capture the local `MediaStream`
1. Broadcast the segments using websocket to all parties
1. Order the segments and compile a transcript on the client side

## Conclusion

You can find [the final project here](https://github.com/speechly/webrtc-speechly).

In this tutorial, you learned about building an WebRTC video chat that Speechly to to provide real-time transcription. You also learned how to use a `MediaStream` as an audio source as well as about our new VAD feature. For the next step, consider deploying the application ([Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) and [Vercel](https://vercel.com/) are both great options) and trying it out with your friends.

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Feel free to reach out to us on our [Github Discussions](https://github.com/speechly/speechly/discussions) page or via Intercom if you have any questions. Thank you!



Learn how to build a WebRTC video chat application that uses the Speechly Browser Client to transcribe audio from a MediaStream.

Create a WebRTC Video Chat App With Speechly Transcription


Building and running a successful web store or e-commerce business is a never-ending optimization process. Every step of the purchase funnel must be as slick as possible to maximize sales and revenue. That’s why big players such as Amazon or Shopify are running [hundreds of tests](https://medium.com/wolfgangbremer/amazon-is-the-king-of-a-b-testing-f46008e3b528) every day.

The optimization starts from advertising and customer acquisition and moves into how the website is laid out and finally into how orders are paid and delivered. The target is to get everything a bit better and eventually the bottom line will have a larger figure in the end of the year. This is basically how a modern e-commerce is ran.

And most often than not, the improvements are very small.

For example the speed of the website has a relatively big effect on the conversion rate: the faster the pages load, the more willing a user is to keep on clicking and possibly purchasing more. If the pages are slow, they might go to another store to browse for similar products or just give up. [Google says](https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data/mobile-page-speed-conversion-data/) that every second in mobile page load time can improve (or decrease) conversions by a whopping 20%.

But getting a second off from the page load time is very hard and probably in real life the increase would be closer to 0,1 seconds. That would increase conversions by 2%. That’s of course great if you have up to [six million purchases every day](https://www.oberlo.com/blog/amazon-statistics) like Amazon, but it’s still only 2%. **_But what if you could improve some key metric in your web store by more than 100%?_**

This can be the case with [adding voice recognition to e-commerce](/blog/voice-search). Let’s first think about why time-to-cart is an important metric in ecommerce, especially in grocery vertical.

### Grocery e-commerce user experience is currently not very good

With all the improvements done to e-commerce platforms in the past years, the user experience consists of searching for products, comparing them and adding some of them to your shopping cart. After the shopping cart is created, the cart is checked out and paid and eventually delivered to the customer.

If you are looking for a single high value product, say an iPhone X, that works well. The user goes through different e-commerce sites and looks for a good price and then orders the one they think has the best combination of price and delivery time. There are even aggregator sites that do this on your behalf and searching from a single page can compare prices from dozens or hundreds of sites and give you the options.

But what if you are not buying a single iPhone but rather dozens of low value products? Searching and adding can quickly become tedious. This is the case with groceries. While there are easily a hundred different milks in a supermarket and a dozen retailers that deliver groceries, the average user is not interested in comparing them all. They just want their usual milk. And after they’ve found their milk, they don’t want to repeat the process for bread, coffee and minced meat, too. That’s what they are forced to do in an average grocery e-commerce store.

Building a grocery cart in a webstore takes easily 30 minutes or more when doing it for the first time. Not exactly a huge time saver compared to visiting a brick-and-mortar store. The good part is that for the second time it’s a lot easier when the user can use their old cart as the starting point and only editing it according to their specific needs; they probably need the same milks and cheeses this time, too, but maybe they’ll want to switch last weeks chicken to beef or add some mascarpone for the weekend’s tiramisu. The first-time user experience is still very bad.

The cumbersomeness of building the initial cart is well-known to retailers and its effect is clearly seen in data. For example [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Retail/Our%20Insights/The%20future%20of%20online%20grocery%20in%20Europe/The_future_of_online_grocery.ashx) has found that after the customer has done their first order, they are highly likely to come back if the user experience is not particularly bad. This is because even if the user experience would not have been great, the added ease that comes from having your old shopping cart available beats the difference.

This is to say that the [competition in grocery ecommerce](https://www.speechly.com/solutions/grocery/) happens during the first purchase. If that is hard, the customer will probably not even complete the order, at least if they have already purchased from somewhere else before. And on the other hand, if the first purchase succeeds and the experience is good, it’s relatively easy to keep the customer and even win customers from someone else.

### Voice for the win

Previously I noted that it’s usually very hard to improve any metric by a significant amount. But based on our data, time-to-cart can be improved by up to 90% by adding the possibility to use voice in adding products to the cart.

In our applications, users say a product they need – such as “5 tomatoes” – and 5 pieces of the most probable tomato product is added to the cart. If the customer wants to change this to another tomato, say to an organic one, they can click on the product and get a list of other possibilities or just say it out loud when adding the product.

This is analogous to how you would purchase groceries in a village shop. If you say "I'd need tomatoes", the clerk is not going to present you with all the different organic cherry tomatoes or ketchups they have available but rather just add five of the most common, basic tomatoes to your cart. If you then say "actually, would you have organic tomatoes" or "I meant tomato sauces", they are happy to substitute them for you.

About 90% of our end-users are generally satisfied with the experience of [voice-based shopping cart](https://www.speechly.com/blog/sok-uses-speechgrinder-for-voice-commerce/). One of the applications has a NPS of about 40.

The experiences are built with Speechly API that is trained to extract product information from user speech input in real time. For example, when user starts saying something like “apples”, the platform already guesses from the first ‘a’ that the user might mean apples, anchovies or artichoke and not oranges, flour or beer.

![Speechly real-time spoken language understanding in e-Commerce](speechly-apple-juice-alternatives-asr-realtime.png)

This is different than most solutions currently on the market that first wait until the whole word has been uttered and only then starts looking that word from the product database.

Speechly experience is analogous to human speech. When we talk with each other, we don’t wait for the other to finish their speak and only after that start processing what they said. We rather process the information simultaneously and keep on nodding and saying something like “a-ha”, “yeah” and “okay” to signal that we are following and understand what is being said. If we don’t understand, we might interrupt and ask for clarification.

The currently available voice solutions don’t work like this. They wait silently until the user has said whatever they want to say, transcribe that into text and then send the text to another system that “understands” the text and does what is required.

Because Speechly combines [speech recognition](https://www.speechly.com/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/) (=turning voice into text) and natural language understanding (=extract meaning out of what waa said), the experience is a lot faster and more natural than with smart speakers. Speechly also supports multimodality which means the user gets instant visual feedback on what was done.

### Conclusions

e-Commerce is an optimization battle, where each step of the purchase funnel should be as optimized as possible. With the scale of operations in many e-Commerce enterprises, an improvement of a few percent can be worth millions.

One of the bottlenecks with current solutions is the creation of the shopping cart. Especially with the case of groceries where products are of low value and the amount of products needed to add to the cart is big, it’s important to make the process as easy and fast as possible. One of the best ways to achieve this is by adding voice capabilities.

Speechly is building a developer tool that enables real-time spoken language understanding. By using Speechly, retailers can add voice user interfaces to their web and mobile apps easily and create a fast, convenient shopping experience. This decreases time-to-cart by up to 90% and can improve user satisfaction and revenue.

If you are interested in adding voice to your e-Commerce, please [contact our sales](/contact) and get it done. If you want to read more about our solutions for grocery vertical, see [our solutions page](/solutions).


Decreasing time-to-cart in grocery ecommerce can have a huge impact on the business, because creating the first cart takes so much time and is cumbersome. With speech recognition, time-to-cart can be decreased by up to 90%.

How Decreasing Time-to-Cart Can Help Retailers Win More Customers in Grocery e-Commerce?


Back in the early times of digitalization, human-computer-interaction meant white (or green!) box blinking on a black screen. We have come far from that. First revolution came in the form of mouses on graphical user interfaces (GUI), then with touch and mobile phones. Now we are entering the era of [voice user interfaces](/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/) (VUI). What does it mean from a UI designer's point of view?

In this blog post, I'll share you some do's and don'ts you should consider when designing a voice user interface. You can find more tips for [voice design in our guide](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/).

## 1 Don't try to imitate human conversation

Conversational AI is a hot buzzword, but people most often don't want to conversate with their computers. Most if not all of us have better friends, even though we do spend more time with our computers and mobile phones than any of them.

Most often conversational AI refer to chatbots. Google defines chatbots as "a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet". These are voice user interfaces for sure, but most often you don't need the bi-directional "talking" that these chatbots offer.

## 2 Update visual UI as the user speaks

Most voice user interfaces are based on a simple question-answer pattern. The user asks something, the system waits and then something happens. Often this something is voice assistant answering back in speech.

This is a problem, as voice is an interrupting channel. If you've ever had a conversation, you'll know that both parties should not speak at the same time. This leads into a noise where neither understands each other.

However, we [humans can easily speak and digest visual information simulatenously](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/). When designing voice UIs, this should be taken advantage of.

When the user says something, the user interface should continously update to reflect the user commands. For example, if the user says something like "Show me red t-shirts from Hugo Boss in size large", the UI can be updated three times: first showing t-shirts, then showing t-shirts from Hugo Boss and last showing large t-shirts from Hugo Boss.

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

This encourages the user to continue with the voice experience and enables the user to correct themselves naturally.

## 3 Show transcript

Transcript is the most important feedback that the user needs when using a voice UI. If the transcript is not shown, the user can't be sure whether they are being listened at all. And most importantly, without the transcript there's no way for the user to understand why they were not understood correctly, if that's the case.

Always show the transcript in the field of vision. When the user activates the microphone, the transcript should be clearly visible in a natural place, either close to the microphone or in the top of the screen.

## 4 Give visual clue on what the user can say

One big issue with voice assistants is that it's impossible for the user to know what they can and can't achieve with the device without trying.

If you ask the assistant to give an alert, that works great. They also know when Michael Jackson died. But does a Google smart speaker know how many steps you took yesterday on Google Fit? It seems no. There's no way a user can know it beforehand, because the smart speaker doesn't give any visual tips on what is possible.

In a real-world application one simple way where this [works great is a form](/blog/turn-any-web-form-into-a-voice-form/). Let's say you want to book a flight and you are presented with a form that has an input fields for from, to, date, class and some other information.

<YouTube videoId="XWqHV1a32LM" />

Now it's very clear for the user what they should say and what is the context in which they should be commanding the system.


Designing voice-first applications requires new approaches to UX and UI design. In this post, we'll go through some best practices for designing voice-driven user interfaces.

Designing Voice UIs


Success in eCommerce requires that your customers not only find what they are looking for but also find products that they didn't know they need. Good search is the key in both scenarios.

## Slow product discovery is one of the top frustrations for ecommerce shoppers

Some customers enter your store knowing exactly what they are looking for, whereas others only have a vague idea of what they want and need some inspiration. In traditional knowledge management terms this is referred to as _findability_ and _discoverability_.

In e-commerce context _findability_ refers to the ease of finding a specific product that the customer is looking for, whereas _discoverability_ refers to the ease of finding potential product alternatives meeting a more vague idea of the need. Why is this important? Because to simplify, e-commerce shoppers have two modes that they are on while shopping, which both need to be catered in an optimal way.

<table>
  <tr>
    <td className="font-bold">Journey</td>
    <td className="font-bold">User task</td>
    <td className="font-bold">Buying behavior</td>
    <td className="font-bold">Time spent</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Product Discovery</td>
    <td>Look for ideas and alternatives</td>
    <td>Impulsive, opportunistic</td>
    <td>More</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Deal Finding</td>
    <td>Look for best deal (price, availability, delivery time)</td>
    <td>Rational, effective</td>
    <td>Less</td>
  </tr>
</table>

**TABLE:** _Typical journeys that e-commerce shoppers are on while looking for products_.

In Journey 1, customers are browsing and want to see as relevant options as effectively as possible. They have not yet made the final buying decision, but might act impulsively. In Journey 2, customers have already made the buying decision and are really looking for the place where they can get the specific product as cheap and fast as possible.

Ensuring that customers find the right products to fit their needs from your catalog as effectively as possible is a top priority for e-commerce merchants and relevant for both Journeys. As a matter of fact, according to studies the slowness of [finding the right product](/blog/voice-search/) is one of the top frustrations for ecommerce shoppers.

_“32% of UK shoppers feel that it takes a long time to find what you want”_

## The dominant product discovery method, product search combined with filters, is major driver of churn

Search alone is a powerful tool if the user knows exactly what they want (Journey 2), but if they are still considering the options (Journey 1), their search terms would by definition be more vague resulting in a large set of search varying results.

So ecommerce merchants have added filters to allow users to better refine the search results of these more vague searches. This is the most common approach for product discovery and most modern online stores use it. However [according to Forrester](https://www.forrester.com/report/Googleize+Your+SiteSearch+Experience/-/E-RES124541) bad product search experience still accounts for 68% of churn, so something must be broken.

Let's go through the most common product search usability problems in touch screen and web applications.

### Product search problem #1: Too many filters

![Screenshot of a eCommerce store with too many search filters](image1.png)

Illustration of an online store that has thirty filters

If the product search has too many search filters, user will have problems browsing through them, even if they can all be relevant. In addition, users might be looking for these filters with different names which means they have problems finding the correct filter even if the store had them.

### Product search problem #2: Too many filter values

![Scnreenshot of an ecommerce store with too many search filter values](image2.png)

Illustration of an online store filter, where there are so many values that the filter requires a separate own search box within the filter

Sometimes the search filters itself have too many values and selecting the correct one becomes tedious. For example, let's suppose the user can select a color as a search filter. On the other hand, adding all possible colors can help the user find the exact color they are looking for but on the other hand, finding the correct shade of blue becomes difficult.

Hence, there's a balance between adding more filter values for more granular search or removing filter values for simplified search.

### Product search problem #3: Confusing categorization

![Screenshot of confusing search categories](image3.png)

Illustration of confusing categories

Sometimes categories itself can be confusing because of naming conventions or other issues. In the example, there are too many brands for the search to be effective. Sometimes the problem is synonyms and naming.

For instance, should a user find USB memory sticks under category "Storage", "Memory", "Accessories" or maybe "Other"?

## Voice search and filtering can radically improve the product discovery experience

There must be a better way. What if instead of pointing, clicking and writing, **users could just say what they are looking for**? And immediately see the results updated in real time in front of their eyes. And what if correcting or changing your mind would be easy and smooth? Here’s a demo of how that can work in practice:

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

Using voice to complement visual product browsing makes discovery significantly [easier, faster and more enjoyable](/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/). Users get less frustrated and browse through more products. Voice powered product discovery and search experience can help e-commerce players improve their conversion and retention, and differentiate from their competitors.

One clear benefit of voice search is that it supports synonyms and different ways of expressing the same thing naturally and intuitively. There's no need to give a single name for a category, but the same category can have many names.

If the user is looking for "pants", but the designer has named this category "trousers", voice search can support both names. Typical graphical user interface can't support both, because this would lead to our problem #2 - too many filter values.

If you want to learn more about voice-enabled product search and filtering, contact us! You can find more cool examples of voice user interfaces [here](/blog/voice-user-interfaces-examples/).


How e-Commerce Players Can Improve Product Discovery with On-site Voice Search


We have seen the User Interface (UI) for computers evolve rapidly since [IBM punched cards](https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/punchcard/) became the dominant input/output medium for computers back in the 60’s. Fast forward to the 2020’s and we see a world dominated by two UIs, Point-and-click alongside typing for the computer and touch-and-swipe on the smartphone. While Voice Assistants have made an attempt to become the next UI in the evolution, this post will show how the next evolution is more likely to be Voice as a UI feature in computer and smartphone experiences.

## Punch Cards, Graphical User Interfaces and Touchscreens

User interfaces have evolved very logically over time. Punched Cards gave way to switches which in turn handed off to the first real open-ended input mechanism, typing. This was the dominant paradigm for nearly 20 years before the invention of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the mouse. However, it was a decade before that interface became common and nearly twenty years before the GUI clearly took over computing interfaces. That was nearly a 40-year run.

![Evolution on UIs vs Computing](evolution-uis-computing.png)

Touch interaction became the next big transition. It was first demonstrated in the 1960s, but it would also be 40 years before it found a true home in the smartphone. That was over a decade ago in 2008 with the iPhone and since that time there have been parallel dominant UIs. Point-and-click alongside typing for the computer and touch-and-swipe on the smartphone.

## Voice UI As The Next Evolution?

It seems obvious that voice technology will usher in the next important UI revolution. Thirty years ago Nuance debuted the Dragon dictation system. This type of technology eventually wound up in enterprise call centers and even automobiles within a decade. However, it still is not common for computers in either the consumer or business sectors. This is despite the fact that [speech is 3-to-5 times faster than typing](https://hci.stanford.edu/research/speech/paper/speech_paper.pdf) and it enables users to efficiently get what they want no matter what buttons or menus are available.

The real breakthrough came in 2011 with the introduction of Siri on the Apple iPhone. This new Voice Assistant category was seen as the next UI evolution. Siri and its competitors like Google and Samsung promised a human-like interaction when handling user requests. That proved to be a promise the Big Tech could not keep. Complaints about how the Voice Assistants didn’t work created a stigma around the solutions that took many years to shed. The Voice Assistant providers found themselves in the “Habitability Gap”, coined by Roger K. Moore. The “Habitability Gap” is a scenario where the closer a solution gets to humanlike conversational ability, the more usable they are until a certain point where the assistants cannot meet the user requirements causing interactions to fall apart.

## Voice UIs as a Feature

Responding to consumer criticism, the leading smartphone companies focused their attention on Voice-enabling command-and-control features such as initiating a phone call, setting a calendar appointment, and asking for directions. These narrowly defined use cases proved far easier to execute consistently and began rebuilding consumer confidence in the interface. This is notable. In order to succeed, the technology had to revert backward along the flexibility continuum. The technology had improved a great deal, but was not ready to cross the gap.

Amazon’s introduction of Alexa in 2014 and Google’s alternative two years later muddied the waters further. Alexa was introduced to support an entirely new device without a screen. It needed to be more capable and conversational because there was no screen to fall back on when the user became stuck. Google Assistant followed and also decided to employ the same UI for smart speakers and Android-based smartphones.

This furthered the rise of half-duplex systems where only one participant in a conversation, the human or the machine, can act at a time, while the other waits.  Despite bold promises of humanlike conversational experiences and encouragement of 3rd parties to build these experiences, consumers use the features that provide the most value consistently. These are simple request-and-response interactions on smart speakers such as requesting music from a streaming service or radio station, asking simple questions, and setting timers.

![Smart Speaker Use Case Frequency January 2021](smart-speaker-usecase-jan21.png)

This trend was also evident on smartphones where Alexa, Bixby, Google Assistant, and Siri jockeyed to be the favored Voice Assistant. The top Voice Assistant use cases to emerge on smartphones are asking questions, placing a phone call, sending a text, getting directions, and setting timers and alarms. Lofty Voice Assistant expectations that often land in the “Habitability Gap” have seen far less use than popular request-and-response features that live in the space just before the habitability cliff.

## Solving User Problems With Voice

Even though consumers were clearly showing the technology providers what they wanted, the Voice Assistant stack was built to support far greater flexibility than was required. The Voice Assistants were over-engineered for the tasks consumers wanted to employ. It is no wonder that many website, web app, and mobile developers looked at Voice Assistants as overly complex and inadvertently applied that sentiment to the viability of all Voice UI Features.

The logical evolution from click and touch is to a much simpler Voice UI solution that helps users actually find the information they need and complete their intended tasks more efficiently, rather than making Voice into a new channel or platform. The ability to support natural language input and accurately identify user intent was the critical innovation. Multi-turn conversations turned out to be superfluous.

If you would like to learn more about the Speechly outlook on Voice UIs as a Feature vs a Channel, download our full white paper on “Voice UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice UIs”.

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice&nbsp;UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice&nbsp;UIs"
  description="Learn how Voice UI features are outperforming Voice Assistants."
  filePath="/files/speechly-whitepaper-voice-uis-vs-conversational-voice-uis.pdf"
/>

_Cover photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash_

From Punched Cards to Touch Screens, User Interfaces have evolved significantly. Will Voice be next in this evolution?

Evolution of UIs


## Hei Suomi!

The Speechly team has been hard at work lately. We launched our Dashboard for private beta and now we are proud to announce that we've now added support for Finnish language, too.

Just like with our English models, the technology can extract any number of intents and entities from users' speech. It can be used in any platform and it's easy to integrate to your current application by using on of our [client libraries](/docs/client-libraries/).

If you want to read more about the technology and our new Dashboard that can be used to build SLU models for voice user interfaces, read [this post](/blog/speechly-dashboard-in-private-beta/).

<YouTube videoId="Qsmurl1HYY4" />

Speechly’s Finnish models are already in use by [S-Group's](/blog/sok-uses-speechgrinder-for-voice-commerce/) beloved voice-powered grocery shopping application and Radiot.fi media player ([App Store](https://apps.apple.com/fi/app/radiot-fi/id886117418?l=fi) | [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.radiosoitinsuomi.radiotfi&hl=en)).

Our technology is language-agnostic and we are planning to support other languages in the future, too. If you are interested in other languages, please contact our [sales](mailto:hello@speechly.com).

If you are interested in playing around with our Finnish models, join our waitlist with the form below and we'll onboard you to our tool. To find more information about the technology, please refer to our [Docs](/docs/).


Speechly Spoken Language Understanding API now has full support for Finnish language.

Speechly Dashboard supports Finnish


## What is the Web Speech API?

The [Web Speech API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API/Using_the_Web_Speech_API) is an experimental browser standard that enables web developers to effortlessly process voice input from their users. Its simple API can turn on the device's microphone and apply a speech-to-text algorithm to convert whatever the user says into text that the web app can process. At first glance, it seems to open the door to voice-enabled web apps.

## The problem

However, [browser support for this API](/blog/web-speech-api-alternative/) is limited. At the time of writing, the majority of its support is centralised in browsers made by Google, who authored much of the API's [specification](https://wicg.github.io/speech-api/). Indeed, the only browsers that do support it are owned by big tech companies that have the scale to afford to include a free speech-to-text service. Apple has [recently joined](https://firt.dev/ios-14.5/#speech-recognition-api) Google in offering a Siri-based equivalent in Safari.

This has a couple of consequences. Firstly, web apps that use this API have a fragmented experience across browsers. One [example](https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/3725#issuecomment-555733958) is Duolingo, which only offers its voice exercises on Chrome. Indeed, even amongst the browsers that do offer the API, the speech-to-text algorithm differs between them, resulting in different transcriptions and different user experiences between browsers. For example, these are some ways different implementations of the API could yield different results:

1. A word may be transcribed correctly by some implementations and incorrectly by others.
2. A word may be transcribed incorrectly in different ways.
3. A word that is recognised correctly may still be formatted differently. A typical point of contention is how to format units, dates, numbers, times, etc. For example, "1cm", "1 cm", "1 centimetre", "1 centimeter", "8 December 2019", "8 Dec 2019", "08/12/2019", "08.12.19", "one million", "1000000", "1 000 000", "1,000,000", and so on.
4. Implementations across browsers are upgraded in a different cadence and something that worked previously in one browser might not work in the next upgrade.

Secondly, there is a trust factor. Developers using the API probably don't realise that they are sending their users' voice data to a service owned by a big tech company like Google. They may assume that the transcription algorithm runs on the device when it is in fact performed in the cloud. Owning the browser and the speech recognition service also gives these companies the power to make arbitrary changes to the API, including turning it off, as well as lock out other browser vendors. An [example](https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/3725#issuecomment-555694620) is Brave, a browser based on Chromium, which is unable to use Google's speech recognition service due to restrictions imposed by Google. Such restrictions widen the feature gap between browsers like Chrome and the rest of the field.

## The solution

Browsers do not have to be limited to using the speech recognition services owned by Google and Apple. There are more widely supported browser standards like the [Media Streams API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Media_Streams_API) that can enable developers to stream audio data from a microphone to _any_ service. The Web Speech API can be replicated by building code on top of these APIs, escaping the vendor lock-in imposed by the browser's native choice of speech recognition service. Indeed, it can be replicated on browsers that _don't_ support it in the first place.

Code that implements missing browser functionality like this is called a [polyfill](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Polyfill). The good news is that there exists a polyfill for the Web Speech API that uses Speechly’s speech recognition service under the hood. Any web app using this polyfill would be able to provide a consistent voice-enabled user experience across all browsers, using an API that the developer has chosen, can configure, and can trust.

The code for the polyfill can be found [here](https://github.com/speechly/speech-recognition-polyfill). It can be used in isolation, but if you are using React to build your web app, we recommend you combine it with [react-speech-recognition](https://github.com/JamesBrill/react-speech-recognition) for the simplest set-up.

## An example using React

The repositories both include examples of the two libraries working together and full API documentation, but we'll repeat the basic example here to give you a taste.

First, Start developing with Speechly and get an app ID. You can find a quick guide for that [here](https://docs.speechly.com/quick-start/stt-only/).

Next, install the two libraries in your React app:

```bash
npm i --save @speechly/speech-recognition-polyfill
npm i --save react-speech-recognition
```

We're going to make a simple push-to-talk button component. When held down, it will display a transcript from the microphone. When the button is released, transcription will end. Using your Speechly app ID, create a React component like the following:

```js
import React from 'react';
import { createSpeechlySpeechRecognition } from '@speechly/speech-recognition-polyfill';
import SpeechRecognition, { useSpeechRecognition } from 'react-speech-recognition';

const appId = '<INSERT_SPEECHLY_APP_ID_HERE>';
const SpeechlySpeechRecognition = createSpeechlySpeechRecognition(appId);
SpeechRecognition.applyPolyfill(SpeechlySpeechRecognition);

const Dictaphone = () => {
  const { transcript, listening } = useSpeechRecognition();
  const startListening = () => SpeechRecognition.startListening({ continuous: true });

  return (
    <div>
      <p>Microphone: {listening ? 'on' : 'off'}</p>
      <button
        onTouchStart={startListening}
        onMouseDown={startListening}
        onTouchEnd={SpeechRecognition.stopListening}
        onMouseUp={SpeechRecognition.stopListening}
      >Hold to talk</button>
      <p>{transcript}</p>
    </div>
  );
};
export default Dictaphone;
```

Run your web app, hold down the button and speak into your microphone (you may need to give the browser permission to use the microphone first). You should see your speech transcribed like this:

![image](speechly-polyfill-example.png)

Give it a try and let us know how you get on! If you have any feedback on either library, raise a GitHub issue on the [polyfill repository](https://github.com/speechly/speech-recognition-polyfill) or [react-speech-recognition](https://github.com/JamesBrill/react-speech-recognition).


Speechly enables full browser compatibility for Web Speech API using a polyfill.

Speechly enables full browser compatibility for Web Speech API


Speechly has published a white paper on improving user experience in grocery eCommerce. This blog post shares the key findings of the paper. You can download the white paper as a PDF at the bottom of this page.

## Grocery industry is facing one of the most fundamental industry shifts in history.

Many grocery retailers in the Western world are facing stagnating growth of sales and falling prices. Total sales have grown only 2% yearly for the past decade and increasing competition from discount chains and increasing labor and commodity costs has contributed to evaporation of over half of the combined profit of publicly traded grocery retailers between 2012 and 2017.

### More than half of the grocery sectors profits have vanished since 2012

![Market share of grocery retail channels 2016 vs 2025](retail-losses-chart.png)
_CHART: Economic value add of publicly traded grocery retailers, billions USD. (Source: [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/reviving-grocery-retail-six-imperatives))_

According to [eMarketerer](https://www.emarketer.com/content/grocery-ecommerce-2019), online foods and beverages are the fastest growing ecommerce product category in the Europe with almost 20% growth. The COVID-19 pandemic has only increased the pace of growth with many retailers reporting three figure growth rates.

Still the same research estimates that groceries will be among the least penetrated markets for the years to come. UK, France, South Korea, Japan and China are a bit more developed, but the share of eCommerce is still nowhere bigger than 10% of total sales.

![Market share of grocery retail channels 2016 vs 2025](chart-marketshare-grocery.png)
_CHART: Traditional supermarkets are losing market share to new channels_

In this paper we will argue that the biggest reason for retail ecommerce having not grown faster is bad [customer experience](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) especially in shopping cart creation phase. The [most efficient way to improve customer experience](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/) in cart building is voice technology.

## Three reasons that still constrain e-commerce sales in grocery retail

Not many millenials would even consider buying flight tickets from a brick-and-mortar store. Still they do their grocery shopping pretty much just like their grandparents did. Almost half of all Britons have never bought groceries online. There are three major reasons why consumers prefer offline experience over online in groceries.

**Delivery costs**; average cost for collecting the items and delivery per basket is around 8-13 EUR. Usually about 80% of this cost is transferred to the customer.

For example Amazon spends a whopping 25% of it’s total revenue on shipping and fulfillment costs.

**Lack of trust**; consumers are accustomed to selecting the freshest foods themselves. They don’t necessarily trust collectors to do that for them. Same goes with replacement products; while the customer is perfectly okay if their 1,5 litres of Coca-Cola is replaced with 1 litre of Coca-Cola, they might not be okay with it being replaced by Pepsi of any amount.

**Bad user experience**; a typical supermarket has about 30.000 to 50.000 SKUs. While customers might enjoy browsing through dozens of red dresses before purchase decision that’s usually not the case with milk or other low-value products. The current customer experience in creating a grocery shopping cart is cumbersome and requires a lot of scrolling and clicking through.

In fact, 85% of online grocery shoppers use the same store they used the first time because it’s a lot easier to modify previous orders than to start from scratch.

Voice is a great addition to grocery eCommerce experience, as purchasers know the products they are looking for and don't need to [search and browse](/blog/voice-search/).

<YouTube videoId="yzdSVV4xjb0" />

_Voice is a natural addition to grocery eCommerce shopping cart creation_

## Case: Walmart is using shoppable recipes to engage consumers

![Walmart logo](walmart-logo.png)

Walmart is collaborating with [Tasty](https://www.businessinsider.sg/walmart-partners-with-buzzfeeds-tasty-2017-12/), a Buzzfeed spinoff that makes recipes and cooking videos. Users of Tasty iPhone app can find over 4000 recipes and filter them by ingredients, dietary needs or difficulty. The app has over 300.000 reviews with an average rating of 4.9 and is among the top 20 of all food apps on the App Store.

Now, with the Walmart collaboration users can also add the ingredients of all Tasty recipes to Walmart shopping cart and either do in-store pickup or have them delivered home.

Sumaiya Balbale, the vice president of e-commerce, mobile, and digital marketing of Walmart said that while ”consumers today are shopping very differently”, Walmart wants to find new ways to get its products in front of shoppers.

Tasty has almost 100 million Facebook followers and over 60 million viewers for its recipe videos, who can now conveniently fulfill their grocery needs from 2200 Walmart stores right after being inspired by a cooking video.

## Read more by downloading the white paper

This is the end of the preview of our white paper. Download the white paper and get access to conclusions and other data points!

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice & the Grocery Industry"
  description="Learn how voice is changing the way people shop for groceries."
  filePath="/files/grocery-voice-speechly-web.pdf"
/>


Speechly published a white paper on how voice technology can benefit grocery retail market. The white paper is available completely for free, no strings attached!

Improve User Experience in Grocery eCommerce


We have published a new white paper with the title "How speech recognition can help grow ecommerce sales".

Grocery ecommerce is still in its infancy despite its fast growth in the past years. The share of shoppers who choose online channels when buying groceries is miniscule compared to the share of online shoppers say, in travel industry. We argue that this is due to bad user experience especially in the first shopping cart creation. Using voice in grocery ecommerce could make the shopping experience faster and more convenient and increase the amount of sales.

SOK, one of the biggest grocery retailers of the Nordic is using Speechly to power its grocery shopping list app. In the process of building the app together with SOK, we've learned a lot on how voice is best used in grocery retail, what are the biggest issues with voice technology in grocery vertical and what are the real-world benefits of voice technology for grocery retailers.

In the white paper, we'll share some of our learnings and give insight on how ecommerce in grocery retail has developed and why voice could best be leveraged. The white paper includes graphs and data points on grocery ecommerce especially in the Europe and is available completely for free.

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice & the Grocery Industry"
  description="Learn how voice is changing the way people shop for groceries."
  filePath="/files/grocery-voice-speechly-web.pdf"
/>

Speechly white paper on improving user experience through voice user interface in grocery eCommerce has been published.

Speech Recognition in Grocery Market White Paper Published


To demonstrate writing voice-enabled apps in practice, we’ll build a smart home controller app that responds with real-time visual feedback to spoken commands like:

_"Switch off the radio in the living room."_

_"Turn on the lights in the bedroom."_

### Design goals

The app is going to be built on two design pillars in particular:

- Responsiveness, so that the user is confident that the app follows the user’s speech.

- Robustness, so that app behaves nicely even if the interpretation of the user’s intents changes during the sentence.

### Understanding real-time speech recognition

By definition, speech-to-text systems give you text (transcript) to work with. Real-time systems provide partial sentences as soon as words are recognised and continue to refine the transcript as the speech progresses.

In addition to this, Speechly, for one, goes a step further by providing you with tagged keywords (entities) and the intent of the sentence as soon as they are recognised. At first, they would be tagged as tentative, and later turn to final.

The above example sentences would be deconstructed as follows:

_"Switch off the **radio** in the **living room**"_

\_→ \_Intent: turn_off, entities: radio (of type device), living room (of type room)

The tags are defined in a voice interface configuration in Speechly Annotation Language (SAL). While I’ve pre-configured the keywords for this example, you can learn how to create your own voice interfaces **[here](https://docs.speechly.com/slu-examples/cheat-sheet/)**.

While we're getting a constant stream of words as the sentence is being uttered, the speaker’s true intentions are only confirmed at the end of sentence (which Speechly calls a final segment).

### Responsiveness

Let’s assume the user would say _"Turn the kitchen lights... on"_.

If we would wait until the end of the sentence before providing any feedback to the user, the time from manipulation (speech) to desired effect may increase to several seconds, rendering the user experience unresponsive and clumsy.

To mitigate this, we will highlight the objects mentioned in the sentence (appliances like _"lights"_ and rooms) to give the user an early confirmation of where and what changes would happen. The speaker may even use this near real-time information to alter his spoken command.

If we wanted, we could even take a more forward leaning approach by actually toggling the lights when we have enough information about the user's intent.

### Robustness

To deliver the robust experience users expect, we need to be prepared for the (luckily, rare) occasion that the intent changes as the speech progresses, sometimes at the very last moment. What if the user would have finished the above sentence with an _"...off"_?

We'll facilitate the changes (big or small) by storing a copy of the app state when the user starts a new sentence. Then we simply recalculate the new state over and over again using the information we receive as the user speaks. By operating on the whole app state allows speech to control all aspects of the application: adding, removing and modifying data on any number of objects are all handled in a similar manner. Reflecting the information upon the last stable state becomes especially important should the interpretation of the user’s intent change in the middle of the sentence. Finally we store the last tentative state as the new stable state for upcoming sentences.

This approach assumes that your app state is fairly compact so that you can effectively create a new copy of the entire app state upon new information becomes available from the speech to text engine, which may occur up to 10 times a second. Also, the user interface needs to be fast enough to keep up with state updates so that won't choke the performance.

### Demonstrating the key concepts in a home automation app

Let's create a sample app to see how it all comes together.

I'm assuming that you have some experience with React so you probably already have [node/npm](https://nodejs.org/) installed. If you want run the demo, prepare a React TypeScript project, but with contents of src/App.tsx replaced with this **[Gist](https://gist.github.com/arzga/da22da22782e0b79c2271ed0f206d6df)** like so:

```bash
npx create-react-app home-automation --template typescript
cd home-automation
# Download and replace src/App.tsx with the Home Automation app
curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/arzga/da22da22782e0b79c2271ed0f206d6df/raw > src/App.tsx
# Install dependencies
npm install
npm install @speechly/react-client @speechly/react-ui
npm start
```

Before walking thru the code, a word about some of the choices I’ve made:

- I used TypeScript with React to help me avoid the dumbest mistakes with the code. More info about TypeScript in React **[here](https://create-react-app.dev/docs/adding-typescript/)**.
- I'm using a home automation voice interface defined in Speechly’s SAL syntax and pre-deployed so we can just use it in the following code. More about that **[here](https://docs.speechly.com/slu-examples/cheat-sheet/)**.
- Some implicit styling is visible in some of the snippets. A reminder from my StyledComponents experiments, but without the dependency...

#### Rendering the app

The main render function is probably pretty much what you’d expect it to be in a React app. The whole of the app is wrapped in a &lt;SpeechProvider> which connects to the Speechly cloud services and enables speech-to-text for any contained component. The appId points to a pre-configured voice interface that defines the keywords and phrases you can use in this app.

```js
export default function App() {
  return (
    <div className="App">
      <SpeechProvider
        appId="a14e42a3-917e-4a57-81f7-7433ec71abad"
        language="en-US"
      >
        <BigTranscriptContainer>
          <BigTranscript />
        </BigTranscriptContainer>
        <SpeechlyApp />
        <PushToTalkButtonContainer>
          <PushToTalkButton captureKey=" " />
        </PushToTalkButtonContainer>
      </SpeechProvider>
    </div>
  );
}
```

#### Data model for the app state

The app has a monolithic state object (think of a React/Redux store). The data model is just a collection of rooms with device states in them. It’s worth noting that the names match those of the entities defined in the voice interface configuration mentioned above. This way the entities returned by the speech-to-text API are easy to connect with the model.

```js
const DefaultAppState = {
  rooms: {
    'living room': {
      radio: false,
      television: false,
      lights: false,
    },
    bedroom: {
      radio: false,
      lights: false,
    },
    kitchen: {
      radio: false,
      lights: false,
    },
  },
};
```

#### Interpreting the speech segment

The details of the state manipulation logic reside in `alterAppState`, which takes the segment and last “stable” appstate and returns a new app state object with segment information reflected on it.

`selectedRoom` and `selectedDevice` are used to highlight the objects the user talks in the user interface.

```js
const alterAppState = useCallback(
  (segment: SpeechSegment): AppState => {
    switch (segment.intent.intent) {
      case 'turn_on':
      case 'turn_off':
        // Get values for room and device entities.
        const room = segment.entities
          .find((entity) => entity.type === 'room')
          ?.value.toLowerCase();
        const device = segment.entities
          .find((entity) => entity.type === 'device')
          ?.value.toLowerCase();
        setSelectedRoom(room);
        setSelectedDevice(device);
        // Set desired device powerOn based on the intent
        const isPowerOn = segment.intent.intent === 'turn_on';
        if (
          room &&
          device &&
          appState.rooms[room] !== undefined &&
          appState.rooms[room][device] !== undefined
        ) {
          return {
            ...appState,
            rooms: {
              ...appState.rooms,
              [room]: { ...appState.rooms[room], [device]: isPowerOn },
            },
          };
        }
        break;
    }
    return appState;
  },
  [appState],
);
```

#### The stable and the tentative app state

As the user speaks, the `useEffect` below fires as a response to changed words, entities and intent in `segment`. The new `tentativeAppState` is then resolved by calling `alterAppState`. Upon the end of the sentence (indicated by the `segment.isFinal` flag) the last `tentativeAppState` is stored as the new “stable” `appState`.

```js
function SpeechlyApp() {
  const { segment } = useSpeechContext();
  const [tentativeAppState, setTentativeAppState] = useState<AppState>(DefaultAppState);
  const [appState, setAppState] = useState<AppState>(DefaultAppState);
  const [selectedRoom, setSelectedRoom] = useState<string | undefined>();
  const [selectedDevice, setSelectedDevice] = useState<string | undefined>();

  // This effect is fired whenever there's a new speech segment available
  useEffect(() => {
    if (segment) {
      let alteredState = alterAppState(segment);
      // Set current app state
      setTentativeAppState(alteredState);
      if (segment.isFinal) {
        // Store the final app state as basis of next utterance
        setAppState(alteredState);
        setSelectedRoom(undefined);
        setSelectedDevice(undefined);
      }
    }
    // eslint-disable-next-line react-hooks/exhaustive-deps
  }, [segment]);
...
```

#### Rendering the app state

The remaining part is rendering the rooms as boxes with devices in them. The renderer uses the information both in the appState and tentativeState to highlight changes to the device states. The selected room and devices are also visualised during the utterance.

```js
return (
    <div
      style={{
        display: "flex",
        height: "100vh",
        flexDirection: "row",
        justifyContent: "center",
        alignItems: "center",
        alignContent: "center",
        flexWrap: "wrap",
      }}
    >
      {Object.keys(appState.rooms).map((room) => (
        <div
          key={room}
          style={{
            width: "12rem",
            height: "12rem",
            padding: "0.5rem",
            borderWidth: "2px",
            borderStyle: "solid",
            borderColor: selectedRoom === room ? "cyan" : "black",
          }}
        >
          {room}
          <div
            style={{
              paddingTop: "1rem",
              display: "flex",
              flexDirection: "row",
              justifyContent: "start",
              alignItems: "start",
              flexWrap: "wrap",
            }}
          >
            {Object.keys(appState.rooms[room]).map((device) => (
              <div
                key={device}
                style={{
                  flexBasis: "5rem",
                  margin: "0.2rem",
                  padding: "0.2rem",
                  background:
                    selectedDevice === device &&
                    (!selectedRoom || selectedRoom === room)
                      ? "cyan"
                      : "lightgray",
                }}
              >
                {device}
                <br />
                {appState.rooms[room][device] ? (
                  tentativeAppState.rooms[room][device] ? (
                    <span style={{ color: "green" }}>On</span>
                  ) : (
                    <span style={{ color: "red" }}>Turning off...</span>
                  )
                ) : !tentativeAppState.rooms[room][device] ? (
                  <span style={{ color: "red" }}>Off</span>
                ) : (
                  <span style={{ color: "green" }}>Turning on...</span>
                )}
              </div>
            ))}
          </div>
        </div>
      ))}
    </div>
  );
}
```

That’s it!

If you created the React app and downloaded the Gist, you should be able to run it, hold the mic button (or hold down the space bar) and try saying combinations of ”turn on”, ”turn off”, ”lights”, ”radio”, ”television” and rooms like ”living room”, ”bedroom” and ”kitchen”.

Hopefully you now have an idea how you can integrate a voice interface to your React app. The next step would be creating something of your own. A good starting point would be thinking of what kind of phrases you’d like to use and sketch them out in Speechly Dashboard.

### Footnotes

- You'll notice that nothing will happen if you leave out a part of the sentence. This example can (and probably should) be improved by allowing the user to specify the key information (the room, device and power state) spread over multiple utterances. This would make the voice experience more flexible and more pleasant to use.
- alterAppState is very reducer-like. It could actually be a reducer, but it would not be able to directly conjure any side-effects like trigger animations/transitions, although they are not showcased in this example.
- For multimodal use, the example could be improved by storing setAppState also at the start of a new utterance. The current approach, which uses setAppState only at the end of the utterance will not work gracefully if the widgets were also manipulatable with touch or mouse, as the old app state is restored upon starting a new utterance. Any app state changes made using GUI would be lost.
- Please note that it's currently possible that the transitional state visualisation may go unnoticed if the tentative period is very short. Improved visualisation may use something like react-spring to launch a clearly visible effect upon a state change, which would ensure that the user has the time to see it.
- If you're interested, there's an article specifically about guidelines for high productivity voice apps **[here](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-application-design-guide/)**.

Happy hacking!

Ari


Learn the best practices for handling speech input in a Speechly React app.

Handling Speech Input in a React App

As the internet has matured, so have the available content types that users can enjoy and approaches for moderating online activity. Most of the early content online was dominated by text and visual based content where audio played a smaller role. Flash forward to the 2020s and you see a very different ecosystem that is dominated by images, videos, and even real time communication channels such as Clubhouse, Twitter spaces or the various [Metaverse](https://www.speechly.com/blog/why-voice-chat-moderation-can-make-or-break-a-metaverse) universes like Roblox that enable Voice Chat.

Since [voice-based moderation](https://www.speechly.com/blog/the-case-for-real-time-voice-chat-moderation-technology-in-the-metaverse) has received less attention over the years than text-based moderation, this post will outline how to use [Speech to Text](https://www.speechly.com/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary) technology to efficiently and effectively moderate Voice Chats and Voice-based content online. We will focus on keyword detection based moderation in which the task is to find specific instances of bad words (or short phrases) from a users’ speech.

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="4 Key Takeaways on Voice Moderation in Online Gaming & the Metaverse"
  description="We interviewed 20+ experts in the Online Gaming & Metaverse space. Here are the key takeaways for Voice Moderation."
  filePath="4-takeaways-on-voice-moderation-in-online-gaming-the-metaverse.pdf"
/>

## Foundation of Voice Moderation: Efficient Speech to Text

In order to build a [Voice Moderation](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/moderation) solution, you will need to use Speech to Text technology. Speech to Text does exactly as the name implies - it converts a user's speech into text that can be used for various downstream tasks, such as Moderation. It’s important to know that Speech to Text is a Machine Learning technology which means that even when it is trained for a specific industry, there can still be instances where the system will make a mistake. This means that on occasion it will “hear” something else than what was actually said.

These Speech to Text mistakes may require special attention in the context of Voice Moderation, because inappropriately implemented moderation can be detrimental to the user experience. The moderation system should not miss obvious cases of toxicity, but accusing innocent users of bad behavior too often can be even more harmful. For this reason, it is important for businesses to consider the tradeoffs in building a Moderation solution that is super strict vs more tolerant. Doing this requires an understanding of Speech to Text False Negatives and False Positives.

## What are Speech to Text False Negatives and False Positives?

False Negatives and False Positives are the most important variables to consider when using Speech to Text technology to build a Voice Moderation solution. 

* **False Negative**: A is a scenario where the Speech to Text misses a “bad” word/phrase and transcribes it as something “good”. 
* **False Positive**: A is a scenario where the Speech to Text transcribes a “good” word/phrase as something “bad”.

Regardless of how accurate the Speech to Text system is, it is impossible to completely avoid the scenario of False Negatives and False Positives. However, what businesses do have control over is the sensitivity of their Speech to Text. With this decision in Speech to Text sensitivity comes moderation trade offs to consider between False Negatives and Positives.

![Confusion Matrix for Binary Classification](false-positive-false-negative-matrix.png "Confusion Matrix for Binary Classification")

## Tradeoffs between Speech to Text False Positives and False Negatives with Voice Moderation

There is a direct trade off with Speech to Text False Negatives and False Positives. If you reduce one variable, the other is going to increase. To better understand this, let's look at an example using a Human Moderator and 2 different scenarios.

### Situation

When the Moderator hears profanity, assume there are 2 levels of confidence to gauge how well they heard the word: ***HIGH*** and ***LOW***.

* If confidence is ***HIGH***, they are more likely to have heard correctly.
* If confidence is ***LOW***, they are more likely to have heard incorrectly.

The Moderator has 2 Possible Scenarios: 

* Scenario 1) Only flag when confidence is ***HIGH***.
* Scenario 2) Flag when confidence is ***HIGH*** or ***LOW***.

### Scenario 1 - HIGH Confidence

In this scenario, the Moderator will flag ***less often*** as they will be more selective in the flagging process. 

* This means there will be ***More False Negatives*** since there will be some cases that were missed that should’ve actually been flagged.
* This means there are ***Less False Positives*** as the Moderator tends to only flag correct cases.

### Scenario 2 - HIGH or LOW Confidence

In this scenario, the Moderator will flag ***more frequently*** as they will be less strict in the flagging process.

* This means that there will be ***Less False Negatives*** since the Moderator is more actively flagging even when not 100% certain on what they heard.
* This means there are ***More False Positives*** since the Moderator likely made more mistakes with the lower confidence threshold.

### Decision - Weighing False Negatives and False Positives

In this situation, the business has to decide whether to be more or less strict in their moderation flagging process. 

* If they favor a ***less strict*** policy, they will follow Rule 1 where the Moderator must have a high degree of confidence before flagging.
* If they favor a ***more strict*** policy, they would follow Rule 2 where the Moderator would be less strict in flagging, but ensure no profanity is making it through.

The tradeoff decision made in this Human Moderator example is exactly how you should look at tradeoffs with Speech to Text for Moderation!

## Finding the Right Balance of False Negatives and False Positives for Your Business

For each level of False Negatives there is a matching level of False Positives. This is called the **Operating Point** of the system. Finding the ideal Operating Point with Speech to Text is the main goal when it comes to Moderation, however where this Operating Point will exist is determined by the context of an individual business and their goals.

For example, if no profanity is tolerated, you might opt for a higher False Positive rate, where flagging is then verified by a human in the loop. Alternatively, if you would like to fully automate moderation and do not have the resource to verify every flag with a human, you would opt for a smaller False Positive rate. (But may have to tolerate more False Negatives as a consequence.)

In order to use Speech to Text for Moderation, you need a solution that can be adjusted to target the specific type of language that is relevant to your business and use case. By using a dedicated Speech to Text model that is trained with data that is relevant for your use case, Speechly can reduce false negatives without adversely affecting the false positive rate.

If you would like to learn more about how Speechly’s Speech to Text technology can be adapted to target specific jargon from your business or industry, reach out to the team with our [Contact Us](https://www.speechly.com/contact) form.

Cover Photo by Karolina Grabowska: [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-tuning-pegs-4472108/)

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="4 Key Takeaways on Voice Moderation in Online Gaming & the Metaverse"
  description="We interviewed 20+ experts in the Online Gaming & Metaverse space. Here are the key takeaways for Voice Moderation."
  filePath="4-takeaways-on-voice-moderation-in-online-gaming-the-metaverse.pdf"
/>

When moderating Voice-based content, there is a tradeoff between false alarms and real cases where moderation is required. Balancing these depends on your goals.

How to Fine Tune Speech to Text for Voice Moderation


Before we jump into voice technology specifically, let’s start with technology more broadly. While a lot of digital innovation is driven by some combination of technology and user need, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of innovation for innovation’s sake. See: [Smalt](https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/8/3/16088526/smalt-smart-salt-shaker-app-alexa-smartphone), a smart salt shaker, [Juicero](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-silicon-valley-shutting-down), a $400 wifi connected juicer, and of course, the [CueCat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat), a barcode scanner that required a lot of personal information in order to serve you advertisements. While these all sound like something you might have laughed at in a SkyMall or SharperImage catalog, they collectively raised over $300m - and none of them exist today.

In the highly popular [Design Thinking](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process) methodology, before you can solve a problem you need to define it. The first step of that process is to Empathize. This crucial starting point requires immersion into the human experience, interviewing and observing subjects. The goal is to challenge your own assumptions and see people holistically in their environments to better understand the issues they experience. It’s only after this immersion that you move on to the next step, which is to Define the Problem.


## Define the Customer Problem Before Developing the Solution

The best products all start with a clear, singular focus on a well-defined problem. From [Duo Security](https://duo.com/)’s focus on making companies more secure by making security easier for employees, to [Lemonade](https://www.lemonade.com/)’s focus on simple, accessible, and fast insurance coverage, there’s power in remaining focused on solving problems. Duo’s founders knew that convoluted and fragmented security solutions that users couldn’t (or wouldn’t) use effectively, put companies at risk. Lemonade realized that confusing insurance policies with convoluted sign up experiences made getting insurance something to dread, and lead to analysis paralysis of multiple different policies. Both of these companies have used technology and good user experiences to grow their businesses. And while they both exist in vastly different categories, they have one big thing in common: they both dove deep into the needs of their users when designing their products.

Most companies do just a handful of things; whether you’re a restaurant focused on making and serving food, or a doctor’s office focused on patient care, the customer comes with a specific end-goal in mind. By talking to and observing your customers, pain points in the overall customer journey can emerge, and they often don’t look like what you’d imagined.

An important thing to remember when you’re looking to define the customer problem is that it doesn’t need to be earth shattering. It could just be a seemingly small pain point that they encounter frequently, or something that happens infrequently but creates a big, negative impact.

As an example, in the quick service restaurant industry, the carryout experience is full of tension. A customer arrives at the location, unsure of whether or not their food is ready. They enter the store and wait to be acknowledged. Their food sits under a heat lamp while they try to get someone’s attention. By the time they get the food, it doesn’t taste fresh. They reach out to management complaining that the food wasn’t fresh. Management sees food freshness as a problem and works to fix it - when in reality, the problem was that the customer didn’t know when to arrive to get their food, and they didn’t know how to announce themselves in order to quickly receive their order upon arrival. Those problems can both be solved by some scaleable combination of operations and technology.


## Identify Pain Points Easily Solved Using Voice Technology

Whether the pain point is tied to the limitations of a touch only interface, like multiple steps to search or filter, or one that comes out of the usage of voice, like being the target of harassment in an online voice chat, voice technology offers new ways to provide clear and immediate value to the user.


### The ability to search by voice in a web or mobile application.

Allowing people to tap to activate a microphone and speak their request rather than type it manually can save time, and cut down on typos in the search experience. The added benefit of voice search with a screen is that you have the ability to display prompts that can help the user by setting expectations and scoping the context of your UI.


### Voice filtering to more quickly sift through information.

Allowing the user’s voice to command and control aspects of the visual interface takes the experience to the next level. Being able to speak naturally and ask the UI to return complex queries like, “Show we women’s shoes in a size nine, in black…actually white. And sort them to show the best deal first,” without tapping to select and deselect multiple categories and sorting orders, hits at a common digital experience pain point. You can try this experience out in our [e-commerce demo](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/) to see just how much faster it really is.


### Using voice transcription and Reactive Voice UI to assist call center agents with form completion.

While many call center software platforms offer agents the ability to save common information that allows them to autocomplete forms, many involve lengthier forms that require a healthy amount of manual input. Whether it’s a request for a detailed medical history or an open-ended query from a homeowner looking for help from a contractor, agents are often acting as stenographers, transcribing the caller’s information while trying to provide them with good service. Leveraging voice technology to run in the background and manage the transcription and information input automatically saves time and lets the agent focus on making a human to human connection with the caller. It’s using AI to improve the customer experience.

If you’re unsure if using voice for transcription and form completion to support agent assistance makes sense for your company, we encourage you to examine how your callers are interacting with your agents, how long it's taking them to complete manual data input, the quality of the information being input, and whether there are any complaints about the experience.


### Voice list building, or adding items to a cart using voice commands.

Imagine for a moment that the word “list” doesn’t immediately bring to mind a notepad and pen. In the digital context, a list can be anything from a collection of to-do’s to a detailed food order in a cart. One of the most common “analog” voice list building experiences is placing an order at a drive-thru. When efficiency and ease of use are top of mind, using voice to add items to a list (or cart) is a natural way to improve a digital experience.


### AI powered voice moderation to improve online community experiences

Whether in the metaverse or online multiplayer games, voice chat is a popular method for communication and collaboration. It has also, unfortunately, been a popular method for harassing strangers online. People targeted by the harassment find themselves with negative associations tied to the online game or community, and some may abandon them altogether to avoid further harm. For the companies that rely on community members and players, this represents an [existential threat to their business.](https://www.speechly.com/blog/the-case-for-real-time-voice-chat-moderation-technology-in-the-metaverse) Implementing voice technology behind the scenes that can leverage AI to help support moderation efforts is not only scalable, it offers real-time recognition and understanding that has a direct impact on real people.


## From Ideation to Implementation of Voice Technology Solutions

Once the customer problems and pain points have been defined, the ideation and prototyping can begin. It’s important to take the idea of a paper prototype and adjust it for the voice experience. In practice, that can look like faking an experience and testing it with users to determine if it’s worth building.

Another option is to build a quick prototype using a simple API like [Speechly’s API](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/#/signup), which allows for quick builds and deployment into existing tech stacks. That means less time dealing with incompatibility and more time focused on testing and iteration across multiple different AI powered voice technology solutions.

Whatever direction you go in, remember to center the user in everything that you do. They are ultimately the ones who decide whether what you’ve built offers them any value.


Using Design Thinking and AI to improve customer experience

How to Use Voice Technology to Solve Customer Problems


There are a few similarities that arise across useful Multi-Modal Voice Interface use cases. As a product builder or team member, being able to identify these scenarios can lead to lucrative opportunities to give users a 10x experience using Spoken Language technology and plant the seed to more sophisticated experiences in the future. In this blog post I am going to discuss the value of Multi-Modal Voice Interfaces, the Scenarios where they thrive, and give a few Examples of these interfaces in action.

## Value of Multi-Modal Voice Interfaces

**Real-Time**

The most valuable aspect of a Multi-Modal Voice Interface is the fact that it allows for developers to truly leverage the power of real-time Spoken Language Understanding ([SLU](https://www.speechly.com/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/)) technology. At a high level, this works by streaming Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) simultaneously, something that is usually done in a one-after-the-other fashion in standard voice interfaces or conversational experiences. This one-after-the-other process tends to encourage shorter user utterances, like common smart speaker Voice Assistant commands, since users are unaware of whether or not the Voice AI is understanding them.

[Streaming SLU](https://www.speechly.com/blog/real-time-voice-user-interfaces/) alongside a screen allows for developers to give visual cues to a user, much like the way we communicate with each other on a daily basis. Whether in person or on a Zoom call, humans give different visual cues to signal to a friend or colleague a whole array of different meanings based on the conversation. For example, when giving a demo or pitch of a new product a presenter is always looking for a head nod from the crowd. That head nod gives the presenter valuable information on if their product or service is actually relevant to that target group of users. Streaming SLU gives Multi-Modal Voice Interfaces that head nod. By understanding a user in real time, a developer can give the user different visual cues to let the user know they are being understood.

**Use Voice, Swipe or Type - Whatever is Right**

Voice alone as an input can be a fantastic experience in certain situations like home automation, asking basic questions, or starting timers. However, the addition of a screen alongside Spoken Language technology allows for voice, swipe, and type inputs to thrive where they make the most sense for the end user. The reality is forcing a voice input only, or conversational experience, can be stressful for a user that is not used to that type of experience.

It is better to approach products from the perspective of how you can best solve a user or market problem. For some problems, a conversational experience might make sense. However, some experiences simply cannot be forced into a solely conversational mold. Using Spoken Language to control technology can be a fantastic way to supplement swipe and typing with an additional input method that is [3x as efficient](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/08/24/stanford-study-speech-recognition-faster-texting/).

## Ideal Scenarios for Multi-Modal Interfaces

**Information Heavy Tasks**

Scenarios that require users to engage in complex searches or repetitive inputs into a system can be a great opportunity for a Multi-Modal Voice Interface. There are a few reasons this can be a valuable scenario. Although ASR has achieved near [human parity](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05256), creating enjoyable end user products that use voice interfaces can be a challenge due to the different complexities that come with language in different contexts. The best way to ensure a good Multi-Modal Voice Interface Experience is to have as much contextual data as possible to give to the SLU model.

This is also important for the end user experience. Although spoken language is a great input for technology, most users are not familiar with the voice modality for everyday experiences outside of basic Voice Assistant controls. If a user has an existing understanding of the context and jargon around a particular process, taking advantage of the voice modality within a familiar experience is easier to overcome.

**Speed & Value**

I have already discussed how the voice modality can be 3x more efficient than typing on a mobile phone. However, speed alone is not a good reason to build a new product. Speed is important when you can attribute it to actual end user or business value. The reality is many businesses have Omnichannel experiences with complex customer journeys and employee responsibilities. I will explore further examples of this later in the post. This reality provides ample opportunity to assess where a Multi-Modal Voice Interface might be a good fit across an organization.

**Existing Digital Experience**

I understand a certain percentage of people who read this post will assume that “Multi-Modal Voice Interface” refers to a voice-enabled device with a screen from a company like Amazon or Google. Multi-Modal Voice Interfaces can apply to contexts outside of the smart speaker Voice Assistant ecosystems. As the point above about speed suggests, businesses should look inward when assessing where to implement Spoken Language technology as opposed to outward at unproven emerging platforms. Existing digital experiences are a better way for you to control the user voice experience and plant the seed for more sophisticated experiences down the road.

It’s not hard to understand why having full control of your brand, user experience, and data would be valuable when building a completely new way for users to interface with your company or product. The reality is, best practices are still being defined across different sectors that are applying Spoken Language technology. Giving product teams full control of brand, user experience, and data allows them to plant the seed with Spoken Language technology and iterate over time to build the best user experience. We can speculate over best practices, but the reality is we have not started to scratch the surface on what is possible with modern day Multi-Modal Voice Interfaces that leverage SLU. This provides a real opportunity to define the future on what user experience looks like with Spoken Language technology.

## Use Case Examples

I believe that the three use cases that I discuss below are great examples that check the box for each of the 3 Scenarios mentioned above.

**Voice Commerce Search, Filtering and Purchasing**

E-Commerce has completely changed the way we buy things. With the COVID-19 pandemic, E-Commerce growth accelerated up to [6 years](https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/12/covid-19-accelerated-e-commerce-growth-4-to-6-years/?sh=325b2141600f). Despite this growth, E-Commerce product search, filtering and purchasing is outdated. Users are required to search and filter by inputting tedious amounts of data into complex menu hierarchies. This scenario is a perfect example of how [Natural Language Voice Search](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI68NT8D1m8&feature=emb_logo) could provide an efficient experience that results in both user value and business value. The user can use their voice to find items more efficiently resulting in less churn and more items being added. This correlates to a direct benefit for the business. It's a win-win making E-Commerce a great place to integrate a [Multi-Modal Voice Interface](https://www.speechly.com/blog/bring-multimodality-voice-commerce/).

**Workforce Efficiency**

Everybody knows the value of data in business today. For this reason, there is a lot of attention spent on how to acquire the most accurate data in the most efficient way possible. In certain professions, such as healthcare, [real estate](https://www.speechly.com/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/), finance or law there are a lot of legal and paperwork requirements that come with the day to day operations of the business. Multi-Modal Voice Interfaces are perfect in these scenarios. Professionals in jobs that require detail-oriented processes to be followed often become intimately familiar with the paperwork, data collection, and data input that is required of them. Being able to complete these processes more efficiently results in a professional being able to book more business which can benefit both that individual and the businesses top line revenue.

**Voice-Directed Warehousing**

Warehouses are an ideal place to implement Spoken Language technology leveraging devices like a phone, tablet, or screen on a piece of machinery. [Voice-Directed Warehousing](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-picking/) is the process of managing a warehouse worker or machine by using a Multi-Modal Voice Interface. Allowing warehouse employees to use Spoken Language as an interface to these devices allows for more efficient and accurate data capture while creating safer warehouse environments due to the hands-free ability. Workers are more efficient due to the 3x speed of voice as an input. We have seen warehouses that leverage SLU technology like Speechly are able to quickly adapt the ASR to their unique acoustic ecosystems allowing for higher quality data capture. The safe environment is a byproduct of allowing workers to have minimal time in front of a screen and maximum time with their eyes being up and alert. Overall, it's hard to argue with the value of Voice-Directed Warehousing for both employees and business owners alike.

As you can see there are opportunities that exist across industries to start leveraging Multi-Modal Voice Interfaces today to create better user experiences. If you are ready to Plant the Voice Tech seed with your users, [reach out to Speechly](https://www.speechly.com/contact).


Identify best use cases for multimodal user interfaces and create 10x user experiences

Ideal Scenarios for Multimodal User Interfaces


[Voice user interfaces](https://www.speechly.com/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/) for the most people mean smart speakers that turn a regular home into a fun sci-fi inspired command center. And while these smart speakers are fun and popular, one thing that doesn't come to mind when thinking about them is improved workforce efficiency.

However, voice features should not be primarily thought as a [smart home gimmick](https://www.speechly.com/blog/why-smart-speakers-are-not-the-future-of-voice/). For smaller and larger corporations alike, they can be a great way to improve employee efficiency in [all industries and domains](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/).

Voice user interfaces can improve workforce efficiency by making data collection easier and faster. They can also help professionals in logistics, factories and workshops control equipments and machinery easier and safer.

## Improved data quality brings clear benefits

Back in the days before computers, most professionals reported by using paper and pen. This works well for short durations and small amounts of data. However, the demand for more and better data has increased tremendously and data has become a key driver for many industries.

The better the data quality is, the bigger the benefit is. Let's consider a maintenance operation in a factory that is in charge of keeping all the machines up and running. The main objective for them is to report and fix the broken equipment as efficiently as possible.

If employees are able to report accurately what was broken, where and how long it took to fix the problem and with what costs, they are able to learn and improve their processes. With data, they'll be able to maintain the equipment in a way that is cheaper and more efficient.

The number one thing that enables them to get good and accurate data is quick and efficient data collection, preferably right on the spot where their employees are working. Voice input can be [up to four times faster than typing](https://hci.stanford.edu/research/speech/Ubicomp18_pdf.pdf) on a touch screen. This means that employees using voice instead of touch are able to input four times more data or spend one fourth of the time they would otherwise spend on data collection.

Voice user interfaces can be used when maintenance personnel are crouching in hard-to-reach areas, while sales people are driving back from a sales meeting or while a forklift operator is collecting pallets. If they would choose to type, the data collection would be delayed and hence the quality of the data would be decreased.

## Repetitive and information-heavy tasks

<YouTube videoId="6GcgPcMOuQk" />

**Inputting data to a CRM is a repetitive and information-heavy task that can be made more efficient with a voice UI**

A majority of professionals spend a big chunk of their day [filling out the same form](https://www.speechly.com/blog/turn-any-web-form-into-a-voice-form/) or application. However, the specific information they fill into these forms is very important.

Let's consider a real estate agent. When they get a new customer, they'll typically fill in some kind of form that asks for the property type, asking price, name of the customer and other relevant information. This is only the first form in a long list of forms that goes along with the real estate industry. An average realtor can have up to 30 customers per year, so filling all these forms can become cumbersome. In Florida, for example, realtors have [over a hundred different forms](https://www.floridarealtors.org/tools-research/form-descriptions) they might need for completing a sale.

When they start selling, they'll hopefully get offers and counter offers that also require some data input. After the price has been agreed upon, there can be even more forms about escrow and the list goes on.

An experienced realtor knows all these forms by heart and knows exactly what kind of information they'll need to input, but they still have to go through each of them manually.

This kind of form filling is a part of many professionals daily work. Almost all professionals fill some type of sales document, anomaly report, review, or daily reports and almost no one enjoys it. Still, getting them right is of immense value to the business.

By enhancing CRM's, ERP's and other professional systems with voice interface functionalities, this data can be collected faster and with better accuracy.

## Accurate and efficient slang makes accurate and efficient user interfaces

One reason why a voice interface is a great solution for professional use is that in many areas of expertise there's a very specific lingo that everyone is familiar with using

For instance "[primp beemer](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/77618/17-secret-slang-terms-your-doctor-might-be-using)" might not mean much to most of us, but in a doctor lingo it would mean a woman who is pregnant for the first time and is obese.

This kind of slang has evolved just because it is important for professionals in any domain to communicate in an efficient and accurate manner. From a voice user interface perspective, it serves exactly the same purpose and makes building complex voice functionalities [a lot simpler](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/) than in cases where the context is more open ended and free form.

Let's consider retail business, for example. A consumer looking for the smaller Series 6 Apple Watch with GPS and cellular could ask something like "the new Apple smart watch with mobile data and with the smaller screen" or "Apple Watch Series 6 40mm cellural". However, the professional sales person would probably refer to it as "Watch6,3" – the official identifier code for the said device or by product code "M0DV3", if they would refer to a specific color.

This is important from a voice user interface perspective because i[f the context is accurate, it makes the voice functionalities efficient and accurate](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-application-design-guide/). It can be difficult to teach the underlying [Spoken Language Understanding](https://www.speechly.com/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/) model to understand all the possible ways a user can refer to a specific product or other phenomena, but it's fairly easy to cover the standard ways professionals refer to the same product or phenomena.

## How to evaluate whether voice data entry is a good fit

Voice is a great solution for data entry in almost all cases. If one or more of the following statements is true for you, then voice data entry could be a valuable option for your organization to consider.

- Data is business critical and can create a competitive edge
- Data collection is a repetitive task
- Employees are familiar with the data collection process, eg. they know what kind of data they need to input
- Data collection happens or can happen in the field, rather than at the office
- Data is quantitative and structured rather than qualitative and non structured
- Current data collection processes could be improved

Voice can also be a useful modality for professional apps, if employees are doing repetitive command and control tasks such as in factories, logistics and back office.

Speechly has experience voice-enabling various professional applications in many industries. Our technology can be applied to any [web, mobile or desktop application](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/).

[Contact our expert](https://www.speechly.com/contact) to learn more on how your business data entry can be improved by using modern voice interface technologies.


Voice user interfaces can improve workforce efficiency by enabling professionals complete their tasks faster and more accurately

Improve Workforce Efficiency with Voice User Interfaces


**This year’s conference was held in the beginning of September in Brno, Czech Republic. Typically there would be some 2000 attendees at the conference, but due to Covid-19, this year most of the attendees joined the conference virtually. I was there on site with 350+ other researchers, and here are my impressions on the scientific catering in the field of automatic speech recognition (ASR).**

## New datasets

ASR is a data-heavy field. Industry leaders are using tens of thousands of hours of transcribed speech to train their models, but most of the ASR research has relied on much smaller publicly available corpora. Only very recently opportunities for using larger non-proprietary speech corpora have emerged. This year Facebook published Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS), but that is limited to read-speech data. Now at Interspeech, two large ASR corpora were published, which extend the available domains:

- SPGISpeech offers 5000 hours of financial calls with rich formatting: [https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/oneill21_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/oneill21_interspeech.pdf)

- GigaSpeech is a 10,000h multi-domain corpus drawing data from audiobooks, podcasts, and YouTube videos: [https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/chen21o_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/chen21o_interspeech.pdf)

Also worth checking is Facebook's research paper which showed that an ASR model trained on publicly available corpora, combined with fine-tuning to target data, works well for real-world tasks:

- _Rethinking Evaluation in ASR: Are Our Models Robust Enough?, Tatiana Likhomanenko (Facebook, USA), Qiantong Xu (Facebook, USA), Vineel Pratap (Facebook, USA), Paden Tomasello (Facebook, USA), Jacob Kahn (Facebook, USA), Gilad Avidov (Facebook, USA), Ronan Collobert (Facebook, USA) and Gabriel Synnaeve (Facebook, France):_ [https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/likhomanenko21_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/likhomanenko21_interspeech.pdf)

## wav2vec

wav2vec is an unsupervised (or "self-supervised" as they like to call it) method for learning speech representation. Its latest incarnation, wav2vec 2.0, is gaining popularity: At Interspeech there were 10 papers mentioning wav2vec in the title, and many more which used it in their experiments. The benefit in using such pre-trained representations are a drastic drop in the training data requirements, thus making it attractive for limited resource scenarios.

A nice analysis on the nature of wav2vec 2.0 was provided by Facebook in their paper:

- _Robust wav2vec 2.0: Analyzing Domain Shift in Self-Supervised Pre-Training, Wei-Ning Hsu (Facebook, USA), Anuroop Sriram (Facebook, USA), Alexei Baevski (Facebook, USA), Tatiana Likhomanenko (Facebook, USA), Qiantong Xu (Facebook, USA), Vineel Pratap (Facebook, USA), Jacob Kahn (Facebook, USA), Ann Lee (Facebook, USA), Ronan Collobert (Facebook, USA), Gabriel Synnaeve (Facebook, France) and Michael Auli (Facebook, USA)_\
[https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/hsu21_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/hsu21_interspeech.pdf)

## Trends in ASR

Rather than introducing a multitude of complex new network architectures, this year's focus appeared to be more on the practical side of ASR: Reducing the streaming latency, fitting the models on-device, and overall reducing computation and memory footprint. Various improvements were presented towards these goals, especially for transformer-transducer models.

For examples, see the following papers:

- _Improving Streaming Transformer Based ASR Under a Framework of Self-Supervised Learning, Songjun Cao (Tencent, China), Yueteng Kang (Tencent, China), Yanzhe Fu (Tencent, China), Xiaoshuo Xu (Tencent, China), Sining Sun (Tencent, China), Yike Zhang (Tencent, China) and Long Ma (Tencent, China)_\
[https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/cao21b_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/cao21b_interspeech.pdf)

- _An Efficient Streaming Non-Recurrent On-Device End-to-End Model with Improvements to Rare-Word Modeling, Tara N. Sainath (Google, USA), Yanzhang He (Google, USA), Arun Narayanan (Google, USA), Rami Botros (Google, USA), Ruoming Pang (Google, USA), David Rybach (Google, USA), Cyril Allauzen (Google, USA), Ehsan Variani (Google, USA), James Qin (Google, USA), Quoc-Nam Le-The (Google, USA), Shuo-Yiin Chang (Google, USA), Bo Li (Google, USA), Anmol Gulati (Google, USA), Jiahui Yu (Google, USA), Chung-Cheng Chiu (Google, USA), Diamantino Caseiro (Google, USA), Wei Li (Google, USA), Qiao Liang (Google, USA) and Pat Rondon (Google, USA)_\
[https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/sainath21_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/sainath21_interspeech.pdf)

- _Reducing Streaming ASR Model Delay with Self Alignment, Jaeyoung Kim (Google, USA), Han Lu (Google, USA), Anshuman Tripathi (Google, USA), Qian Zhang (Google, USA) and Hasim Sak (Google, USA)_\
[https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/kim21j_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/kim21j_interspeech.pdf)

Looking for something more exotic? Check out the research on non-autoregressive ASR:

- _An Improved Single Step Non-Autoregressive Transformer for Automatic Speech Recognition, Ruchao Fan (University of California at Los Angeles, USA), Wei Chu (PAII, USA), Peng Chang (PAII, USA), Jing Xiao (PAII, USA) and Abeer Alwan (University of California at Los Angeles, USA)_\
[https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/fan21b_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/fan21b_interspeech.pdf)

RNN transducers are still going strong. Several publications had adopted the Hybrid Autoregressive Transducer (HAT) approach for combining external language models with the end-to-end model.

- Speechlys approach, [“Fast Text-Only Domain Adaptation of an RNN-Transducer Prediction Network”](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/pylkkonen21_interspeech.pdf), published officially at Interspeech and is a lighter-weight solution, but more about that later!

## And more...

Interspeech is a lot more than just an ASR conference, too much to cover in a single blog post. One interesting and timely topic was the COVID-19 challenge: detecting infection based on cough and speech samples!

- _The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: COVID-19 Cough, COVID-19 Speech, Escalation & Primates, Björn W. Schuller et al._\
[https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/schuller21_interspeech.pdf](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/pdfs/interspeech_2021/schuller21_interspeech.pdf)

You can browse the full list of publications at [https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2021/index.html](https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2021/index.html)


Our report from Interspeech, the largest scientific conference focusing on speech science and technology.

Interspeech 2021: Take-aways on Automatic Speech Recognition


Everyone who has built a robust natural language user interface, be it a voice UI or a chatbot, knows that getting all the details right can take quite a bit of work and iterations. Also, while most tools for building natural language UIs are designed around the same principles (intents and entities/slots), getting to grips with the intricacies of each platform can be similar to learning a new programming language.

Hence, to lower the barrier of entry to Speechly from legacy voice UIs, we are excited to introduce a new feature that lets you create a new Speechly application from an existing Alexa skill in a few simple steps. With this feature, folks can easily turn their Alexa skill into a streaming Speechly voice application that can then be used to enable Reactive Voice UI experiences on the Web.

## Here’s how it works

1. Export your Alexa Interaction Model (as a JSON file) from the Alexa developer console.
2. Create a new application on the Speechly Dashboard.
3. Upload the Alexa Interaction Model into the new application. It will be converted to a Speechly configuration that you can edit as if it was written for Speechly from scratch.
4. Click “deploy”, and you’re done. In a few minutes the application is trained and ready for you to try out in the Speechly Dashboard.
5. Use the Speechly Client Libraries and Web UI Components to integrate the Speechly application to your own website UI and business logic.

<YouTube videoId="0t2tijg9UgI" />

## Supported Alexa features

At the time of launch, we support the following Alexa slot types:

1. `AMAZON.NUMBER` (mapped to `SPEECHLY.NUMBER`)
1. `AMAZON.ORDINAL` (mapped to `SPEECHLY.SMALL_ORDINAL_NUMBER`)
1. `AMAZON.DATE` (mapped to `SPEECHLY.DATE`)
1. `AMAZON.TIME` (mapped to `SPEECHLY.TIME`)
1. `AMAZON.PhoneNumber` (mapped to `SPEECHLY.PHONE_NUMBER`)
   (Note that there may be small differences in the way the returned slot values are normalized.)

Good to note: as per Speechly’s single-turn Reactive Voice UI paradigm, the conversion feature does not support dialogue management features that Alexa skills sometimes rely on. The resulting Speechly application can recognize the intents and slots as they appear in the Alexa Interaction Model, however, Speechly will not trigger follow-up questions for instance if the user’s utterance is missing a required slot.

If you are new to Speechly, take a look at our [Design Philosophy Guide](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/). There you will find guidelines and best practices for creating websites & applications with Reactive Voice UIs.

## Let us know how we can make this better

We believe that this feature is useful for those of you who have heavily invested in developing Alexa skills, but would still like to give Speechly a try. This will be especially useful when you are interested in evaluating Speechlys NLU accuracy on your application. (An arguably necessary step to take when considering any new voice UI platform.)

The feature is now released as a public beta, and we are happy to receive feedback on how to make it more useful for you. Likewise, please let us know if you would need support for other platforms in addition to Alexa.

[Start developing today](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/) with Speechly, see [our demos](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/), and check out [our documentation](https://docs.speechly.com/).

Amazon Alexa and all related logos and motion marks are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

_Cover photo by Jessica Lynn Lewis on Pexels_


Create a new Speechly application from an existing Alexa skill in a few simple steps.

Introducing the Alexa-to-Speechly conversion feature


We have seen the adoption of Voice Assistants start to flatten in 2022, with [adoption around 50-60%](https://voicebot.ai/2022/04/15/voice-assistant-adoption-clustering-around-50-of-the-population/) of the US population for Smart Speakers, Smart Phones and In the Car. While there are various challenges facing Voice Assistants to continue its growth, the main inhibitor for Voice Assistant growth lies in the User Experience itself. Users do not want to have “Conversations” with their technology, they want to get tasks done, and this limitation is the core emphasis of this post.

## Voice Assistant Challenges

Turn-based conversations favored by the popular voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri can sometimes be more convenient than manual input methods, but they are often too slow and tedious. The assistant must wait for you to finish speaking before it can determine your request and then defaults into a spoken response. You then must wait for the assistant to stop talking before moving on to another step.

This makes for a terrible User Experience when you recognize that the assistant has misunderstood the intent (what the user is trying to accomplish with the Voice Command), but still must wait until it finishes speaking before making the correction. And barging into the "conversation" while the voice assistant is speaking to clarify the original request is rarely successful. Instead, you typically wind up starting over with your initial command, albeit with a slight tweak in how you say the command.

So it is not a big surprise when you look at smart speakers and smartphones, the most popular use cases for voice assistants are predominantly user-directed requests. Smart speaker users ask questions, ask to play music, ask for the weather, ask to set a timer or alarm. Smartphone voice assistant users ask to initiate a call, or for directions, or music. Many pose questions expecting a straightforward response or answer. These are all single-turn interactions meaning there is no back-and-forth conversation required or desired. A simple request is spoken and the device completes the task. That's it.

## What does this tell us?

We rarely need to _Converse_ with our digital devices through multiple turns to complete our task of interest. The real focus should be on _Spoken Commands_. When pairing these Spoken Commands with a website or mobile app, think of “Voice as a Feature” vs an Assistant and you are likely to deliver a better user experience.

This insight is why at Speechly we developed the model of building Voice UIs as a Feature that blends alongside existing ways of interacting with a screen such as typing, tapping, or swiping.

## Aligning Limitations with Expectations

Academic research backs up this observation. Many people are familiar with the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley describes the relation between how humanlike an artifact is and someone's emotional response to it. The emotional response increases as human likeness increases up to a point where it suddenly plummets.

![Uncanny Valley](uncanny-valley.png)

Roger K. Moore of the University of Sheffield's Speech and Hearing Research Group cited materials from Mike Phillips during a 2006 IEEE workshop that found a similar pattern with conversational capability. This model compared the usability of a voice interactive solution with its flexibility in conversational dialogue. The closer the solutions get to humanlike conversational ability, the more usable they are until a certain point where the assistants cannot meet the user requirements. He calls this the “Habitability Gap”. Moore commented:

> "There appears to be a non-linear relationship between flexibility and usability... As flexibility increases with advancing technology, so usability increases until users no longer know what they can and cannot say, at which point usability tumbles and interaction falls apart."

![Habitability Gap](habitability-gap.png)

## Voice UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice UIs

There are limitations with the Voice Assistant model, however there are tangible opportunities for Voice as a Feature in our Web and Mobile applications. If these opportunities are of interest to you, consider checking out our full white paper on “Voice UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice UIs”.

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice&nbsp;UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice&nbsp;UIs"
  description="Learn how Voice UI features are outperforming Voice Assistants."
  filePath="/files/speechly-whitepaper-voice-uis-vs-conversational-voice-uis.pdf"
/>

_Cover photo by Sigmund on Unsplash_

Voice Assistants ushered in a wave of excitement around Voice Technology, but years later the limits of Voice Assistants are clear.

Limits of the Voice Assistant Model


Finland is a home to many highly succesful tech companies and startups ranging from gaming companies such as [Rovio](https://www.rovio.com/) and [Supercell](https://www.supercell.com/) to delivery company [Wolt](https://wolt.com/en) or IoT company [UROS](https://uros.com/).

In fact, Finland has been leading Europe in the amount of VC capital collected for two consecutive years. Last year, foreign investments to Finnish startups increased by a whopping 48%.

This is why we are humbled to be selected to [Top 10 Most Promising Startups in Finland](https://www.talouselama.fi/uutiset/talouselama-valitsi-10-lupaavinta-startup-yritysta-paatimme-katsoa-pitkalle-tulevaisuuteen-katso-tasta-koko-lista/bd08f4d5-3d62-4ecf-b726-d27b818a221f?ref=linkedin:5277) by Talouselämä, the leading business media here in Finland.

Other companies that made the list include:

Boksi.com - automating influencer marketing
Infinited Fiber Company - turning trash into premium textile fiber
Origin by Ocean - saving the environment by refining seaweed
QHeat - developing sustainable heating solutions
ReceiptHero - turning old-fashioned receipts digital
Spacent - creating technology for dynamic workplaces

The three companies that retained their spot on the list are
IQM Quantum Computers - building quantum computers, such as Finland's first
Aiven - open source database infrastructure management
Varjo - building high-performance XR headsets

Speechly is building developer tools for making applications smarter with voice functionalities. Our unique approach enables real-time visual feedback from the moment the user starts speaking. This allows the user to verify that their input is correctly understood, encouraging them to go on with the voice experience or enabling them to correct themselves in case of an error.

You can read more about the benefits of our technology [here](https://www.speechly.com/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/) or see examples of what you can build with Speechly [here](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-user-interfaces-examples/)

If you are interested in hearing how our technology can improve your application, [reach out to us](https://www.speechly.com/contact).


Talouselämä, a leading Finnish business media selected ten of the most promising startups in Finland for 2021. Speechly was one of them

Speechly Selected as One of The Most Promising Startups in Finland 2021

At Speechly, we are known for the speed of our Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding. This is all thanks to our Streaming API. 

However, as our user base has continued to grow so has the demand for new product features. One of the most requested features to date is the ability to use Speechly for transcribing large amounts of pre-recorded audio or video content. 

Given that demand, we are excited to release the Speechly Batch API for Enterprise users.

## Transcribe Large Amounts of Pre-Recorded Audio and Video with the Speechly Batch API

The Speechly Batch API enables users to easily and privately send large sets of pre-recorded audio or video files to Speechly for Speech Recognition. This makes it easy to complete tasks like Transcription, Moderation or other types of Speech Analysis on large amounts of off-line audio or video data.

To use the Speechly Batch API, users simply submit the audio and read the results after it is processed. The throughput of the Speechly Batch API supports processing thousands of hours of audio per hour. You can submit the audio directly to Speechly or give the Google Storage or Amazon S3 file URL, making it easy to scale.

With the Speechly Batch API you can expect the same performance and accuracy that you would expect from the Streaming API. We also offer Enterprise customers data annotation services for continued monitoring and improvement in the performance of your Speech Recognition.  

When deploying the Speechly Batch API, customers have the ability to deploy On-Premise or in a Private Cloud. These deployment options help customers leverage Speech Recognition in the most secure and cost-effective manner possible.

## Example Scenarios for the Speechly Batch API

The use cases for the Speechly Streaming API and the Speechly Batch API are the same, however the Streaming API is used for live online scenarios while the Batch API is for offline scenarios. This means you should use the Streaming API if you need to process speech in real-time as it’s being recorded. Use the Batch API if your audio or video has already been recorded and you need to process later on. Below are a few examples where the Speechly Batch API is ideal:

**User Generated Content Monitoring** - Massive amounts of podcasts and video are being recorded and uploaded everyday. Speechly makes it easy to transcribe any user generated audio or video content uploaded to your platform for use cases such as Moderation, Content Categorization or Content Indexing, Measuring Brand Awareness and Strategic Ad Placement.

**Meeting Analysis** - The Speechly Batch API makes it simple to convert meetings into transcriptions for later analysis. This can be used for use cases such as creating Meeting Summaries or making it easy to search back through past discussions for specific information. 

**Customer Support** - Speechly can quickly and accurately transcribe recorded customer calls. This can be used for use cases such as Measuring Agent Performance and Agent Training or extracting & documenting relevant customer support information. This is different from monitoring a conversation in Real-Time, where the goal could be to offer the Agent relevant information as the call is happening. This would be another example of where the Speechly Streaming API would be better suited.

If you are interested in learning more about how to use the Speechly Batch API, you can read more in our [Documentation](https://docs.speechly.com/apis/batch-api/). If you would like to learn more about getting access to the Speechly Batch API, [Contact Us](https://www.speechly.com/contact) today.

Today we are excited to announce the Speechly Batch API for Transcribing massive amounts of pre-recorded audio or video content.

New Feature Release: Batch API for Transcribing Pre-Recorded Audio


In the past five years we've seen tremendous technological advancement in the voice and [Natural Language Understanding (NLU)](https://www.speechly.com/technology/voice-api/natural-language-understanding/) space. In 2016 we saw [speech recognition reach human parity](https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/18/13326434/microsoft-speech-recognition-human-parity) in some of the classical conversation speech recognition benchmarks. Alexa launched and Google introduced their assistant smart speaker. Speechly was founded with the idea that the asynchronous turn-based conversational model could be improved upon.

The advancement has continued, growing leaps and bounds in less than a decade. We now have superhuman accuracy in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as well as Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for many of the most well known ASR and NLU benchmarks.

However, despite these technological advancements, voice as a User Interface (UI) and as a UI modality has yet to live up to its promises. Most people still only use voice technology as a way to hear the weather, turn off the lights in their home, or to voice search short queries in a browser.

The reason? While the technology has advanced, the user experiences have primarily remained the same, trapped in the context of a conversational assistant style experience. The end result is a gap between what the technology is capable of, what people want, and what current day voice UIs actually deliver.

![phones](./phones.png)

_Even something as ubiquitous as touchscreen technology didn't see widespread adoption until the introduction of the iPhone, which made the experience feel natural and intuitive. iPhone image credit: [Rafael Fernandez](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:TheGoldenBox), [IPhone 1st Gen](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_1st_Gen.svg), [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)_

For a modality to take off, it has to feel effortless - magical, even. Most of the technology and design approach today doesn't meet expectations.

That's a controversial hot take for a company rooted in the voice technology industry - but the only way that we advance and grow the industry is by looking at it objectively and working to build better, higher quality experiences.

So what is quality? The classical definition is that a product is of high quality when performance meets expectations. Let's look at why the improvement in technological quality has yet to result in improvements in user perception of quality.

## Voice Enabled AI Problems Require Human Focused Solutions

People are very good at detecting fakes, and the closer something comes to resembling human behavior, the more the small deviations from this behavior start to feel disturbing. It's that shift into the uncanny valley where the creepiness outweighs the cool.

Many of the voice experiences over the last decade are reliant upon the assistant persona to manage the handoff into any third party applications. This ties the success of the voice channel to the voice assistant persona's ability to manage against the uncanny valley feeling. Voice experiences have been built as one-off applications, often with little to no visual elements. The tech has been focused on trying to make the AI feel like a human by forcing users into a conversation, with the idea that it will feel natural.

Humans cannot speak and listen at the same time. Therefore any conversational communication happening in these legacy assistant experiences is one direction at a time, and not simultaneous. As smart as the AI gets and as "human" as the technology is made to feel, it still doesn't resonate as a good experience because of how slowly information is exchanged.

On the other hand, it is easy for humans to process visual information and speak at the same time. When sighted people speak to each other, they're often watching for visual cues from the other person to show that they understand, or have a question, as they speak. With newer technology that leverages standard Graphical User Interface (GUI) elements, you can build a voice enabled experience _for a human_ that includes a visible reaction on a screen to show understanding. In the voice-only experiences, this visual feedback is typically missing.

When you add voice to the visual UI you are making the machine more powerful, and the experience more intuitive. With Reactive Voice UIs the [visual interface](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/ui-design) and the user communicate with one another in both directions simultaneously. The communication is fast. The experience feels natural.

From a user perspective, it's the difference between trying to interact with a peculiarly behaving almost-human to controlling a highly functioning machine. From the designer's perspective, it means having access to another tool in the [toolkit](https://docs.speechly.com/design-philosophy/set-right-context/) to help drive UI design forward.

## The Role of a Screen in a Voice User Interface

By leveraging the screen and existing user interface design best practices, building with voice starts to feel much more accessible and intuitive to both the user and the designer.

Screens are incredibly helpful when it comes to setting expectations and scoping the context of your UI. Voice-only experiences often give users analysis paralysis because there's no intuitive way to understand what they can do or say, and there's a limited understanding of what features are supported. Users are left to guess at what is possible, which means that they encounter a long list of things that are _not_ possible along the way.

When voice-only assistants present the experience as infinite, it quickly becomes clear just how limited it can be.

Outside of voice, most applications are designed to do just a few things but to do those few things, and communicate what they are and how to use them, very well. If we apply that same idea to experiences with voice, the voice UI should use existing UI conventions and the visual elements of the screen to communicate the scope of what is possible to the user.

## The Impact of Voice Technology & User Interaction Design Principles on Voice UI Adoption in the Marketplace

The gap between user expectations and value delivered to the user in many voice experiences can be significantly reduced by applying the design principles of [Reactive Voice UIs](https://www.speechly.com/blog/ui-components-for-voice-uis-in-the-web/) to the design and development of voice experiences to help properly set expectations up front, and improve the delivery of the value by mapping it directly back to the user interface.

With Reactive Voice UIs, the designer builds in visual feedback elements that help the user better understand how and when to use voice for a more efficient experience. This can look like commonly understood elements such as a microphone button with a "Push to Talk" button or an overlay component that provides feedback about the voice input.

![speechly ui](./speechly-ui.png)

When these features are combined with a new technology called [Spoken Language Understanding](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEYKiM9Ta9s)™ (SLU), it allows the user to speak and have the UI instantly map their words to actions within the UI. In practice, SLU and a Reactive Voice UI come together to create experiences like this:

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

It feels almost…magical.

_Cover photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels_

How Reactive Voice UIs & Spoken Language Understanding™ improve voice user experiences from legacy voice tech, grow feature adoption on web and mobile

Next Generation Voice User Interface Design & Development

The ultimate glossary of speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) terms. Utterances, slots, ASRs and wake words explained in layman's terms. Contact us if you find errors!

Machine Learning and Speech Recognition Glossary

Admittedly, we didn’t know much about this at Speechly before 2022. Our main focus has been on building a fast, accurate, and efficient voice user interface for applications. However, during our time in the Y Combinator accelerator, several companies suggested they could use our technology to help them moderate voice chat and content in games, metaverses, and other applications. So, we began studying the problem.

What we found was a compelling issue with plenty of challenges and few good options. There were several solutions for text chat moderation, but companies had learned that voice moderation was either prohibitively expensive or too inaccurate to implement with any confidence. That led us to apply Speechly to the voice moderation problem. 

In our own efforts to understand the problem better, we came across a number of interesting studies that we thought might be useful if you are also researching online harassment. Below is a compilation of research on the topic. We will update this post as new studies are released and learn about earlier data. 

Let us know what we missed. Please drop a link using our [Contact Us](https://www.speechly.com/contact) form, and we will add it here. We hope the data here proves useful in your work!

## Pew Research on Online Harassment

Pew Research has been [tracking online harassment](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/01/13/the-state-of-online-harassment/) since 2014 and has some useful trendline information along with insightful recent findings.

![](majority-say-online-harassment-is-a-major-problem.png)

![](2-3-adults-under-30-harassed-online.png)

![](online-harassment-of-women-more-severe.png)

![](under-30-more-likely-harassed-online.png)

![](41-americans-experienced-online-harassment.png)

![](women-sexual-harassment-doubled-2017.png)

![](women-vs-men-most-recent-harassment-experience.png)

![](most-recent-harrassment-online-location.png)

![](online-harassment-major-problem.png)

![](1-3-americans-support-suing-sites-of-harassment.png)

### **TLDR Takeaways from Pew Research:**

* 41% of U.S. adults have personally experienced online harassment, and 25% have experienced more severe harassment.
* The majority of younger adults have encountered harassment online.
* While men are slightly more likely to experience harassment online, women are more likely to be upset about it and think its a major problem.
* Experience with certain types of online abuse varies by age, gender, race or ethnicity.
* Roughly four-in-ten Americans have personally experienced online harassment.
* Women are more likely than men to be harassed online. The total accounts of online sexual harassment have doubled since 2017.
* Social media is the most common location for online harassment. However, for men harassment is more likely to take place in online gaming.
* Younger adults are more likely to have been harassed online while gaming, text/messaging app, or online dating vs on a forum, social media, or in personal email.
* 55% of Americans consider online harassment to be a major problem.
* Users are becoming critical of the job social media companies are doing to address online harassment.

## ADL on Online Harassment in Social Media

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has also conducted extensive research into online harassment. The organization produces two reports, one for online harassment overall with a particular focus on social media, and another for gaming. The [2022](https://www.adl.org/resources/report/online-hate-and-harassment-american-experience-2022) and earlier reports for social media shed new light on the problem.

![](online-harassment-percentage-since-2020.png)

![](stop-or-reduced-usage-from-online-harassment.png)

![](platforms-where-harassment-took-place-vs-use.png)

![](men-vs-women-online-harassment-experience-ever.png)

![](social-platforms-where-harassment-took-place-2020-2022.png)

![](worried-of-being-targeted-online.png)

![](action-taken-by-platforms-online-harassment.png)

![](online-harassment-experience-over-last-12-months.png)

### TLDR Takeaways from ADL Online Hate and Harassment Survey:

* Online harassment has remained stable across platforms since 2020 despite tech companies public commitment to improve safety on their platforms. 
* In response to being harassed, almost a third of users (29%) stopped or reduced their use of platforms altogether, especially Facebook (19% reduced their use, and 10% stopped altogether).
* Youth are more likely to report harassment on Instagram and Snapchat vs Facebook than adults.
* The data suggests that harassment was less common on Twitter than on Facebook, more common than on YouTube or Reddit, and comparable to the likelihood of being harassed on Instagram.
* Comparing Harassment vs Use you are most likely to experience harassment on Facebook (81%) followed by Twitter (44%), Snapchat (41%), Instagram (37%), Discord (35%), TikTok (31%), Twitch (26%), Youtube (21%), and Reddit (18%).
* More than a third (37%) of women reported being harassed at some point compared to 43% of men.
* Of those worried about future harassment, 62% were worried about being harassed for their political views, 53% for their physical appearance, 47% for their race or ethnicity, 44% for their religion, and 43% for their gender.
* Of the respondents who faced physical threats 53% said they reported the content; only half of those reports led to any action by the platform.
* A third of respondents who were harassed reported being called offensive names.

## ADL on Online Harassment in Gaming

ADL also has extensive data on online gaming experiences. These include [survey results](https://www.adl.org/hateisnogame) that express both positive and negative experiences.

![](positive-experience-in-multiplayer-games-last-6-months.png)

![](positive-gaming-experiences-last-6-months.png)

![](severe-abuse-online-is-getting-worse.png)

![](disruptive-behavior-in-gaming.png)

![](influence-of-disruptive-behavior-in-gaming.png)

![](controversial-topic-reaction-online.png)

![](adult-safety-settings-for-children.png)

### **TLDR Takeaways from ADL Hate is No Game Survey:**

* The vast majority of young gamers—more than nine out of ten—reported some form of positive social experience in online multiplayer games.
* Online games at their best can function as social platforms connecting people and building communities for a multitude of lived experiences.
* For the third consecutive year, harassment in online games has not decreased. Five out of six adult gamers experience harassment in online multiplayer games—more than 80 million American adults.
* Three in five young people experienced harassment in online multiplayer games—nearly 14 million young gamers. 
* Over a quarter of young gamers who experienced harassment in online multiplayer games quit specific games. 
* A third of young gamers changed how they play, including not speaking in voice chat and altering their usernames. Voice chat is notorious for being a significant locus of in-game abuse.
* The most common responses to exposure to extremism and disinformation were ignoring it (18%) and reporting or blocking the players involved (17%).
* Less than half of parents or guardians surveyed reported having implemented the safety controls in online multiplayer games that were analyzed in this survey.

## The Experience of Women Gamers

You can see from some of the data above that women’s experience with harassment while gaming differs from men. Some [examples](https://www.ivint.org/gaming-hidden-sexism-and-harassment/) of [additional data](https://www.statista.com/statistics/232383/gender-split-of-us-computer-and-video-gamers/) are included below.

![](gender-gap-in-online-gaming.png)

![](abuse-of-female-gamers-by-males.png)

![](share-of-gamers-male-vs-female.png)

![](59-women-mask-gender-gaming-online.png)

S﻿ource: GamesIndustry.biz

### TLDR Takeaways on Experience of Women Gamers:

* Women make up a large % of online gamers with the split being 52% Male and 48% Female.
* Despite a lot of women playing games, the majority of game developers are Male - with 76% Male and 22% Female.
* In the U.K. online harassment from men towards women is causing women to stop playing games altogether.
* Online harassment towards women is so common that 59% of women mask their gender while playing games online.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: Pexels

Online harassment is as old as the internet. However, where it was once rare and infrequent, it is now increasingly common. The data all points in one direction and is compiled here.

Online Harassment Statistics that Matter for 2022


When the Voice Tech industry discusses use cases for Voice Technology, the primary focus is on using your voice to control some sort of device. However, this focus negates to ask one essential question: is this where the best use cases for Voice Technology exist today? In facing this necessary reality, there are many use cases outside of simply controlling the devices around us. These can be found in contexts where there are conversations taking place - such as video conferencing, online multiplayer game voice chats, and customer service call centers to name a few, that are not discussed nearly to the same level. Why is this the case and why should the voice tech industry be paying closer attention to Human to Human Interaction (HHI) scenarios? I will answer both of those often overlooked questions as well as provide use cases I believe the Voice Tech industry should be paying more attention to.

## Why the Voice Tech industry has been primarily focused on using Voice to control devices

When you think of Voice Technology, the first thing that comes into your mind is probably one of the popular Big Tech Voice Assistants, such as Apple&#39;s Siri, Amazon&#39;s Alexa, or Google Assistant. This is not a surprise. If you look at the world of Voice Technology prior to the introduction of Siri and later Alexa, most Voice Tech conversations were taking place in the world of R&amp;D labs vs in the real world. In fact, it wasn&#39;t until 2018 that [Microsoft reached Human Parity](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/04/5ad57de362ee0-5ad57de362f1dHuman-Parity-with-CNTK-@-GTC-Mar-2018-v2.pdf.pdf) with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and the following year that Microsoft also reached [Human Parity with Natural Language Processing](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/machine-reading-systems-are-becoming-more-conversational/) (NLP).

As Voice Technology started to show more promise back in the mid 2010&#39;s, you also saw massive investment from Big Tech companies into their respective Voice Assistant platforms. For example, as of 2018 Amazon had over [10,000 people](https://voicebot.ai/2018/11/15/amazon-alexa-headcount-surpasses-10000-employees-here-is-the-growth-rate/) working on Alexa alone and also stood up a $200M dollar Venture Fund to spur investment into companies building supporting services and applications for the platform. Although Amazon is arguably the top performer when it comes to a Big Tech company starting new projects without the fear of shutting them down, such as the Fire Phone, companies like Amazon have remained persistent with investing into their Voice Assistant platforms. This is despite a [stall of adoption](https://voicebot.ai/2022/03/02/the-rise-and-stall-of-the-u-s-smart-speaker-market-new-report/) by the Voice Assistant market.

When you look specifically at the sheer investment into Voice Assistant experiences by the biggest technology companies in the world, it&#39;s easy to understand how they control the majority of mindshare on &quot;the best&quot; use cases for Voice Technology. The question then arises: has this caused the wider Voice Technology industry to overlook great use cases for the underlying Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies that help power Voice Assistants? I believe it has, particularly within the context of HHI scenarios.

## Why should we pay attention to where Voice Technology can add value in Human to Human Interactions?

Humans have been interacting and transacting online since the early days of the internet, however with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a massive acceleration in digital transformation across all industries. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft [said](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/30/2-years-digital-transformation-2-months/), &quot;We&#39;ve seen two years&#39; worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security…&quot;. Alongside the explosion of remote work and services like video conferencing, we also saw big changes on the consumer side of things with the rise of a new space called [Social Audio](https://www.highfidelity.com/blog/most-popular-social-audio-apps), paved initially by Clubhouse and quickly followed by Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and Spotify.

A key detail with the digital transformation scenarios previously mentioned is that they have a common and relevant attribute: Human to Human communication taking place in a digital world. With this also comes a massive amount of audio data that presents both challenges and opportunities for the developers of these experiences.

## Challenges and Use Cases for Voice Tech in an Audio Rich World

### On Device Transcription

First, I want to start with a use case that has been a mainstay for ASR technology, but has seen some unique challenges alongside the rise of a world that has gone more remote, Transcription. Traditionally, ASR technology has been run in the cloud for transcription. However, as the usage of experiences that leverage ASR have continued to grow, so have the costs associated with these experiences - making running in the cloud less attractive or viable from a business perspective. One solution to this cost problem is running ASR on-device vs in the cloud. While that is easy to write down in a strategy deck, the technical challenges around being able to run ASR on-device are less straightforward. Solving this challenge, though, comes with an additional value proposition outside of cost alone, which is the added increase in speed of transcription.

### Moderation

The next challenge I would like to address is moderation. Whether looking at new domains where conversations are taking place, such as Social Audio or Virtual Reality, or more established domains like Social Media or Online Gaming, moderation has always been a hot topic. Even Microsoft has had to [shut down](https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/microsoft-shutters-part-of-its-social-metaverse-for-safety-reasons/) part of their &quot;Social Metaverse&quot; due to an inability to properly moderate the conversations that were taking place.

This is a problem that cannot be solved simply by adding more human moderation for 2 distinct reasons. First, humans come with bias and no matter what you do to eliminate that bias, history has proven it&#39;s nearly impossible to eliminate it from decisions made regarding moderation. The second is the sheer scale of audio data that needs to be monitored. Although apps like Clubhouse have seen a decline in downloads over the last few months, they have created a new category all together that has captured the attention of Big Tech as at least a feature of their platforms and saw a growth in daily rooms being created to [700k](https://influencermarketinghub.com/clubhouse-stats/#toc-19). Real time ASR and NLU technologies present a great tool to augment human moderation for specifically being able to call out things like hate speech, harassment, and profanity with audio data.

### Assistance

The final challenge I would like to discuss can be generally described as Assistance. Specifically, I am referring to Customer Support and Sales scenarios. These domains have also seen a rapid rise in the amount of conversational data that is captured as more of our professional work and everyday consumer habits have continued to shift into a more digital and remote world.

With both Customer Support and Sales, voice technology has been a tool for post-call analysis to better train agents on how to improve performance in future calls. However, advancements in voice technology have enabled us to take the next step and make these insights happen in Real-time as opposed to after a conversation has already ended. The benefit here is clear: agents can now learn during their calls while also having an Assistance tool to better serve customers and prospects.

## Now what?

Should the Voice Technology industry shift its focus to ignore using voice to control the devices around us? No! Rather we should constantly challenge ourselves to think outside of the box on what the best use cases are for modern day Voice Technologies. The best use cases might be closer than you may think.

Did any new use cases come to mind for Voice Tech while you were reading this? Let us know your ideas or general thoughts from this post on Twitter [@SpeechlyAPI](https://twitter.com/SpeechlyAPI).

_Cover photo by Cam Adams on Unsplash_

Modern Voice APIs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have created new ways for voice technology to enhance user and employee experiences that go beyond device control alone.

Overlooking Great Voice Technology Use Cases


We’re excited to share that we’ve partnered with Wix.com to bring Speechly’s voice technology to their 200 million users worldwide.

Speechly collaborated closely with the Wix.com team on the design of a voice enabled feature package that can easily be integrated into [WixStores](https://www.wix.com/app-market/wix-stores) sites. This collaboration makes it possible for WixStores shoppers to experience machine learning powered voice enabled features like voice search and voice filtering, all customized for each site.


## Adding a Voice User Interface to Wix Sites

Step by step tutorials have been put together to add a [voice search bar](https://www.wix.com/velo/blog/post/real-time-voice-to-text-search-with-velo-and-speechly) and to add [custom Reactive Voice UI components](https://www.wix.com/velo/blog/post/voice-commerce-is-the-future-of-e-commerce).

<YouTube videoId="XR_2E6FEQ7o" />

Beyond the “behind the scenes” technology, the package includes things like the customizable Push to Talk UI component, which makes it simple for shoppers interested in activating the voice feature as a part of their shopping experience.

Speechly’s proprietary Spoken Language Understanding® technology powers the experiences by extracting the meaning and intentions of the user’s spoken language, and turning it into useful data - without forcing them to alter the way they naturally speak. That means that Wix sites will now be able to map speech to intents in real-time, allowing visitors to see their words instantly generate reactions within the site.


## Why Using a Voice API Makes Sense

From the ease of integration across multiple browser types to the ease of scalability and simplicity of integration into an existing tech stack, [voice APIs ](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/)are great options for developers looking to add voice features and functionality to their digital experiences.

Wix users can experience it for themselves using the Speechly for [Wix Stores Velo package](https://www.wix.com/velo/example/Speechly-Integration).

_Cover photo by Vojtech Okenka on Pexels_

Partnership between Speechly and Wix.com makes it easy for eCommerce Wix Stores to add voice technology to their sites

Powering the Future of Voice Commerce with Wix.com


We have published a new client library for [React](https://www.reactjs.org), the leading Javascript library for building user interfaces.

The client library interacts with our Spoken Language Understanding API and makes it easy for React developers to add multi modal [voice user interfaces](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) to their apps.

If you are interested in building modern React applications that include all user interaction modalities, [contact us](mailto:hello@speechly.com) or see the resources below.

You can find our other SDKs and client libraries from our [Integrations](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/).

## Resources

- [React client library](https://github.com/speechly/react-client)
- [Simple search filtering application](https://github.com/speechly/react-example-repo-filtering)
- [React client tutorial](https://www.speechly.com/docs/client-libraries/react-client/)


Our new React client is the best and easiest way to improve touch screen experience in React applications with intuitive voice user interfaces

Speechly React Client published


## What’s wrong with current voice UIs

There is a lot of positive momentum around [voice interfaces](/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/). We’ve all seen the stats: the number of smart speakers in US households has risen steadily for the past five years. The share of [voice searches](/blog/voice-search/) of all search engine traffic has soared. Yet, the type of revolution that the touch screen gave birth to, after the launch of the iPhone, hasn’t really happened for voice — despite all the hype. Why is that?

Anyone who has a bit of experience from using voice interfaces knows that you can do simple things like setting on the alarm, switching on the lights, or playing your favorite music on Spotify pretty easily. However, if you try to do anything more sophisticated, say, [order pizza](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/) for your eight best friends, reserve an intercontinental flight for a family of five, or buy a new party dress online, the chances are that you're going to fail miserably. For more demanding and for most real-world tasks, the user experience with voice just isn’t there yet — at least as it is for the touch screen.

Still, contrary to what people might think, the problem is not really anymore in speech recognition or natural language understanding accuracy. Even for fairly open-ended domains, both speech recognition and natural language understanding accuracy is pretty close to human parity.

The problem lies rather in the way these systems give feedback to the user. Typically, when a voice command is uttered, the modern [voice assistants](/blog/why-smart-speakers-are-not-the-future-of-voice/) wait until the user has stopped talking (using the technique called endpointing) before they start processing it. This works great for short things like “turn on the lights” or “Play X on Spotify”. However, for more complex tasks this is a disaster.

Imagine if you need to express something that requires a longer explanation. When looking for a new t-shirt, a person might be tempted to say something like “I’m interested in t-shirts for men ...in color red, blue or orange, let’s say Boss ...no wait, I mean Hilfiger ...maybe size medium or large ...and something that’s on sale and can be shipped by tomorrow ...and I’d like to see the cheapest options first.”

When uttering something this long and winding to a traditional voice UI, most likely something will go wrong, resulting in the familiar, “Sorry, I didn’t quite get that.” Having just made the extended effort of explaining your intent to the system, this is an extremely frustrating experience. Or even worse, the endpointing might trigger a false positive half way the utterance, causing the voice assistant to prematurely resolve the intent and start a voice synthesis response, interrupting the speaker violently and irritatingly.

In the following sections of this article, we will introduce the powerful techniques of streaming spoken language understanding and reactive [multi-modal voice user interfaces](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) that address the very problem the current generation of voice UIs suffer from.

## Streaming Spoken Language Understanding

Contrary to the traditional voice systems that rely on endpointing to trigger a response, the systems using streaming spoken language understanding actively try to comprehend the user intent from the very moment the user starts to talk. The idea is that as soon as the user says something actionable, the UI is able to instantly react to it.

<YouTube videoId="tSi7vJuIyT0" />

The benefit here is that if the system does not understand the user, the UI will instantly signal this back. This way the UI will fail fast but also recover quickly as the user can immediately stop, correct, and continue. On the other hand, if the system does understand the user, also this information is conveyed immediately. This gives reassurance to the user that their message is going through, and that they can continue their expression. As long as the system understands, the user can just go on and on, which results in longer and more complex utterances that are supported.

Moreover, the immediate feedback from both the small failures and successes of the UI can be combined in a way that the users can correct either themselves or the UI in an online manner, e.g., “I’m interested in Boss, no, I mean Tommy Hilfiger”. This ushers a way for the UI to not only support more sophisticated and complex UI workflows but also a more stream-of-consciousness way of expressing the users’ intent. This is more natural for humans and requires much less effort than the very specific way that the current voice UIs require the utterances to be given.

## Reactive and non interruptive multi-modal voice user interfaces

The most prominent feedback modality of the current day voice interfaces is voice synthesis. As a feedback mechanism, however, this works poorly as any ongoing user utterance will be abruptly interrupted — a problem exhibited commonly in the contemporary voice UIs. As a feedback mechanism, voice is also a pretty narrow band. Instead, the feedback should be given with a non-interruptive modality. Such modalities include haptic, non-linguistic auditory, and perhaps most naturally and expressively, visual feedback. Using these modalities, the UI can react fast and without interruption to the user. For instance, in the case of “I’m interested in t-shirts,” the UI would swiftly show the most popular t-shirt products, instantly enabling the user to continue with a refining utterance, ”do you have Boss.” This narrows further down the displayed products to show only the Boss branded t-shirts.

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

This iteration loop reminisces a familiar setting to everybody: human face-to-face communication, which is, in effect, a reactive, multimodal communication setup. In fact, it is a common misperception that human face-to-face conversation is primarily turn-based (or half-duplex) in a similar fashion that chatbots or voice assistance are. Meaning, first I say something, then you say something, then I say something again, and so on. Not exclusively. The human face-to-face conversation is very much full-duplex: as one person talks, the listener gives feedback with nods, facial expressions, gestures, and interjections like aha and mhm. Furthermore, if the person listening doesn't understand what is being said, they are likely to start making more or less subtle facial expressions to signal their lack of comprehension. This is the tight full-duplex feedback loop that makes human face-to-face communication so efficient. The same efficiency is exhibited in the reactive multi-modal voice user computer interfaces!

## Voice is not the UI, voice is a modality!

At the height of the voice assistant hype ushered in by Amazon Alexa, many probably heard the flying phrase “Voice is the UI!”. This article disagrees. Voice is a modality! By augmenting a UI with voice in combination with other available modalities, the result can be an extremely efficient UI.

> The perfect interface is when you can use touch and voice seamlessly and choose the best option for the context, sometimes interchangeably

This efficiency comes from how the modalities work together, not from voice alone. Voice is, for instance, a very efficient method for [inputting rich information](/design/). For scrolling, swiping, pointing, or selecting between a couple of valid alternatives, touch is probably better. For displaying complex multidimensional information, the visual display is unbeatable. Combining all of these modalities in a smart way is the killer app.

## What was the revolutionary thing in the iPhone?

Circling back to where we started, the iPhone moment. What made the iPhone so powerful? Well, the very intuitive swipe and pinch gestures with which the user could effortlessly control their phone. However, when the iPhone came out, the touch screen wasn't a new thing. There had been prior touch screen devices. They just sucked! You could swipe or press, and a second or two later something would happen.

What the iPhone brought to the mix was the extremely fast feedback that its touch screen could provide to the user, resulting in the very intuitive, fluid, and satisfying user experience of controlling your phone. Voice UIs based on streaming spoken language understanding are a similar type of revolution. The streaming spoken language understanding offers extremely fast, fluid, and intuitive feedback to the user akin to what the iPhone brought to the controlling devices back in 2007. However — this time, voice is in the center, providing user experiences that we haven’t seen before, ushering the iPhone moment at last for voice as well.


The extremely fast feedback that the iPhone touch screen experience provided to the user, resulting in a very responsive and intuitive user experience is still missing from current voice user interfaces.

Why Hasn’t the iPhone Moment Happened Yet for Voice UIs


SOK is one of the biggest grocery retailers in Nordic with yearly revenue of over 11 billion euro. Their current strategy is heavily focused on unique digital services and increasing customer satisfaction. They've been active in developing new ways for grocery shopping, so it was natural for them to be the first retailer in Finland to provide voice-enabled shopping experience for their customers.

"Digitalization means better service for customers. It enables new ways to combine supply and demand", **Taavi Heikkilä**, the managing director of SOK says.

While many do believe voice will be the key differentiator for future ecommerce solutions, building services on top of Google Home or Amazon Alexa is not always feasible, especially for enterprises. SOK decided to use Speechly because they wanted to [build their voice experience](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) on top of their own systems and platforms.

<YouTube videoId="etvskJy3hqw" />

"Data ownership and privacy issues with current smart speakers solutions shunned us away from third party platforms. We wanted total ownership of our own brand and product visibility", **Harri Laaksonen**, SOK eCommerce development manager says.

The application enables SOK customers to build their shopping list by using voice. If the user says "eggs", for example, the application adds the most popular eggs to their shopping list. If the customer wants to select another egg product, they can simply tap on the product and select another one from a list. This multi-modality is another feature not available on smart speaker solutions.

"Great customer experience is the key. Sometimes the best experience needs touch, sometimes it needs voice. If your application doesn't offer both, you are missing something", Mr. Laaksonen says. "Just like we offer both self-service and regular cashiers in our physical stores we want to let our customers decide how they want to shop".

The current version of the application is still missing the possibility to order products on shopping list, but it's still very well reviewed with an average rating of 4.6 on App Store. The possibility to purchase products from the application is on the pipeline and will be implemented to the product.

"One of the major drawbacks of current [grocery ecommerce solution](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/) is the creation of the first shopping cart. It's a cumbersome task to click and browse through dozens of different milks and hundreds of different breads but once you've done it once, it's easy to repurchase. That's why voice works so well in grocery ecommerce.", Otto Söderlund, the CEO and co-founder of Speechly says.

The shopping list application is still under active development and new version of the software with shopping capabilities is due to arrive to App Store later this year.

You can read more on how grocery retail market can benefit from voice technology by downloading our white paper on voice in grocery retail.

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice & the Grocery Industry"
  description="Learn how voice is changing the way people shop for groceries."
  filePath="/files/grocery-voice-speechly-web.pdf"
/>


SOK, one of the market leading retailers in the Nordics, is using Speechly’s voice UI to make mobile grocery shopping easier and faster.

SOK is Using Speechly to Facilitate Grocery Shopping

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Speech as an Accelerant – Are Voice Assistants Necessary?"
  description="Learn more about how Voice Assistants are holding back Voice-enabled experiences."
  filePath="speechacclerant_opus_final_v2.pdf"
/>

A handful of voice assistants introduced by tech giants have become household names, but their high-profile has not been accompanied by reliable results and repeated use. The lack of ubiquitous voice apps and general blasé uptake by consumers resulted in [Opus Research](https://opusresearch.net/wordpress/) and Speechly asking the question: *are Voice Assistants necessary*? The outcome is a white paper that examines the common attributes of successful voice apps that make it easy for individuals to use very brief utterances to accomplish complex, but everyday, tasks.

## White Paper Topics:

* **Learnings from Successful & Unsuccessful Voice Experiences**
* **Impact of Speed with Voice User Interface (UI) Features**
* **Making more of Search and Navigation**
* **Preparing for Voice in the Metaverse**

A few Big Tech voice assistants have become household names, but their high-profile has not been accompanied by reliable results and repeated use. Why?

Speech as an Accelerant – Are Voice Assistants Necessary?


Great news from Helsinki! Speechgrinder has been operating for two years now and our tools and services are getting ready for prime time. Soon we will be able to release public documentation for our tools and APIs and you can start building the next voice killer apps with our cutting-edge technology.

While we get ready for our big launch, we've also decided to change our name from Speechgrinder to [Speechly](/blog/what-is-speechly/). The new, shorter name will serve us well in the upcoming months when we are finalizing our documentation and start expanding to US market.

All our services, including APIs will be migrated to new domain speechly.com, but the name change won't affect our current customers in any way.

You can find us on social media with our new name, too:

- Twitter ([SpeechlyAPI](https://twitter.com/speechlyAPI))
- LinkedIn ([Speechly](https://www.linkedin.com/company/speechly))
- GitHub ([Speechly](https://github.com/speechly/))
- AngelList ([Speechly](https://angel.co/company/speechlyAPI))
- YouTube ([Speechly](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvEar86D8CnD3zDJSydOdbA))
- [Speechly Documentation](https://docs.speechly.com/)

If you have any questions be it about our name change or something else, don't hesitate to send us a mail at [hello@speechly.com](mailto:hello@speechly.com). The full press release can be found [here](https://www.speechly.com/press/press-releases/speechgrinder-is-now-speechly/).

Welcome to the startup world, Speechly!



## What's new in Speechly Browser Client v2.0

The main new feature with the Speechly Browser Client v2.0 is the capability to flexibly choose an audio source for the client via the [Media Capture and Streams API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Media_Streams_API). This is a significant evolution to the client and it's also a breaking change.

Previously the only way to provide the client with audio was to use the device’s default microphone. It was challenging to control which microphone was used if there were multiple microphones available. When initializing the Speechly Browser Client, the client behind the scenes silently chose the first audio capture device it found.

Moreover, if you had audio available for example as a live `MediaStream` or in an audio file, and thus no need for a microphone, you had to resort to elaborate workarounds.

The Speechly Browser Client v2.0 fixes these issues.

Using the default microphone is still straightforward. It exists in a separate `BrowserMicrophone` class that you can initialize and attach to the client, and everything works as before. However, a nice bonus of separating the default microphone implementation from the client is that you ask for the microphone permission only when the microphone is initialized, instead of when the client is created!

Furthermore, now you can also attach any existing `MediaStream` object from which the audio will be read. This allows to easily integrate Speechly for example to WebRTC applications that expose incoming and outgoing audio as `MediaStream`s.

Finally, to make things easier when dealing with audio files, we've added a `uploadAudioData` function which decodes the given audio data and uploads it to the API. This currently works with popular file types such as WAV, MP3, M4A and others.

Check out [Speechly Browser Client v2.0 on NPM](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@speechly/browser-client).

## How to upgrade to Speechly Browser Client v2.0

### Install the package

```bash
// Using Yarn
yarn add @speechly/browser-client

// Using NPM
npm install --save @speechly/browser-client
```

### Updates to microphone

Speechly Browser Client v2.0 extracts the microphone to a separate class and as a result the initialization looks a bit different. Also note that `startContext` and `stopContext` have been renamed to `start` and `stop`.

```js
// Before
import { Client, Segment } from '@speechly/browser-client'

const client = new Client({appId: 'your-app-id'})
await client.initialize()

client.onSegmentChange((segment: Segment) => {
  console.log('Received new segment from the API:',
    segment.intent,
    segment.entities,
    segment.words,
    segment.isFinal
  )
})

await client.startContext()
setTimeout(async function() {
  await client.stopContext()
}, 3000)
```

```js
// After
import { BrowserClient, BrowserMicrophone, Segment } from '@speechly/browser-client'

const client = new BrowserClient({ appId: 'your-app-id' })
const microphone = new BrowserMicrophone()
await microphone.initialize() // must be called from a user triggered event!
await client.attach(microphone.mediaStream)

client.onSegmentChange((segment: Segment) => {
  console.log('Received new segment from the API:',
    segment.intent,
    segment.entities,
    segment.words,
    segment.isFinal
  )
})

await client.start()
setTimeout(async function () {
  await client.stop()
}, 3000)
```

### Usage with audio files

You can now use the new `uploadAudioData` function to send an `AudioBuffer` directly to the client without using the microphone.

```js
const client = new BrowserClient({ appId: 'your-app-id' })
const response = await fetch('url-to-audio-file')
const buffer =  await response.arrayBuffer()
await client.uploadAudioData(buffer)
```

For more details, check out our [GitHub repository](https://github.com/speechly/speechly/tree/main/libraries/browser-client). Happy developing!

The Speechly Browser Client v2.0 is now available on NPM. In this post we’ll cover the major changes as well as how to upgrade to the new version.

Speechly Browser Client v2.0 Released


We’ve been hard at work at Speechly for the past months and as a result of that work, we’ve opened up our new Speechly Dashboard in private beta. And the best thing is, you can join the beta, too!

Speechly Dashboard is our web tool that can be used to build Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models that can be used to build voice user interfaces to any app or service. The model is configured by providing it with sample utterances that are annotated using our own syntax language.

After the model is configured, it can be tested in the Speechly Playground and integrated into applications with our client libraries. You can even share the Playground to your friends or colleagues for feedback.

Speechly Playground is a web application that provides the user with a microphone and when an user gives permission to the browser and starts speaking, it returns with the user intent and entities that are extracted as per the sample utterances that it’s configured with.

If it sounds complicated, it’s not. Let’s make an example: we want to build a simple home automation app that can be used to turn on and off lights in different rooms. These actions are the user intents that our model is interested in. The user has two kinds of intents, to turn the lights on and off. Let’s call them `turn_on` and `turn_off`.

The rooms where the lights can be activated are modifiers for these intents. We call these modifiers `entities`. In some other similar tools they can also be called `slots`.

Now we have to think of different ways the user can control lights with our app. It’s easy to think of at least a few different ways. Here’s a short list of these examples or `utterances`.

```speechlySal
- Turn off the lights in kitchen
- Switch the lights on in bedroom
- Turn the bedroom lights on
- Make the living room dark
- Turn the kitchen lights on
- Switch on the bedroom lamp
```

The more sample utterances we give to our model, the better it works, so you can (and you should!) come up with more. In a real-life application, you’d preferably collect these from your users, too.

Because the Speechy uses deep neural networks for doing the end-to-end speech-to-intent, it quickly learns to generalize and detect intent and entities correctly even for cases that it has not been explicitly trained for. This means that the developer does not need to build an exhaustive list of user “commands”, but rather examples that train a model that can adapt to natural human speech. For users this means that they can communicate using their own words and expressions rather than having to learn and repeat preset commands.

Now we have to annotate the sample utterances. We have the two intents, turn_on and turn_off, so we just tell each utterance which intent it has. With our syntax, it’s done like so:

```speechlySal
*turn_off Turn off the lights in kitchen
*turn_on Switch the lights on in bedroom
*turn_on Turn the bedroom lights on
*turn_off Make the living room dark
*turn_on Turn the kitchen lights on
*turn_on Switch on the bedroom lamp
```

But now our model would return exactly the same intent with each of these utterances and it would be hard to distinguish between different rooms.

Let’s use entities for this and annotate the utterances again.

```speechlySal
*turn_off Turn off the lights in [kitchen](location)
*turn_on Switch the lights on in [bedroom](location)
*turn_on Turn the [bedroom](location) lights on
*turn_off Make the [living room](location) dark
*turn_on Turn the [kitchen](location) lights on
*turn_on Switch on the [bedroom](location) lamp
```

Now our model would know, for example, that for the first utterance, the user intent is to turn off the lights and the room where the user wants to turn them off is the kitchen. We could make this even smarter by using our advanced SLU rules, but that’s a more advanced topic that you can learn more in our [documentation](https://docs.speechly.com/).

Now that we have configured our model, it can be tested in the Speechly Playground. The Playground returns the user intents and entities in real time along with the text transcript of what was said.

![Speechly playground](speechly-playground.png)

When the model works as expected, it can be integrated into a website, iPhone or Android app or any other service by using our [client libraries](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/).

If you are interested in getting an access to our private beta, sign up to our waiting list with the form below. You can also send us an email to appid@speechly.com and tell more about what you are trying to achieve and we’ll help you forward.

Speechly Dashboard for building Spoken Language Understanding models released for private beta. Join hundreds of other interested developers and sign up for our wait list!

Speechly Dashboard Private Beta


Speechly has existed now for about for five years. We are a team of 13 experienced software developers and machine learning experts and for the most part of that five years, we’ve been operating in stealth mode, focusing on building our core technologies. Now it’s time to tell what we’ve achieved so far.
We are building a [developer tool](/develop/) for improving touch screen user experience by voice functionalities. We don’t believe that smart speakers and voice assistants are the best use case for voice, but voice should be thought of as an add-on to current mobile applications’ and websites’ user interface. Voice is a modality, not a complete user interface.

Touch screen user interfaces definitely need improvements: while selecting from a few options is easy, selecting for example 30 items from an inventory of 20.000 is pretty cumbersome.

Typing is notoriously hard, too. Most humans speak about three times faster with less errors than they type. In short, voice is a great solution for information heavy tasks. While there are good solutions for speech recognition, there’s really no tools that would enable developers build the kind of user interfaces we’ve envisioned for voice.

2020 was our first year when we really published something out in the wild. We’ve built our technology for the past five years and now Speechly is finally in a stage that a developer can configure a model, integrate it to their application and build an awesome voice user interface. In this post, I’ll summarize our achievements.

## 1 Spoken Language Understanding accuracy matching Google

We run our own ASR and NLU technologies that provide both transcript and meaning (intents and entities) in real-time. During the 2020 we achieved significant increases in both ASR and NLU accuracy.

We evaluate the accuracy of our engine by transcribing the data we receive with both our own and with [Google Cloud Speech API](https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text). Based on our results, our Spoken Language Understanding is in a typical voice user interface task **15% more accurate** than Google.

Because ASR is a hard task, this is not to claim that our technology is better than Google in all cases. It means that when building voice user interfaces, Speechly outperforms Google in most cases, even without training the model separately for a certain use case.

In a real case, Speechly can further be optimized by using the actual user data for retraining the model. This improves the accuracy typically by another 10-15%.

## 2 Client libraries for most important web and mobile platforms

During the 2020, we’ve published three client libraries that make integrating Speechly to an application simple and fast. Handling GRPC API, real-time audio streaming and of course parsing the results is a cumbersome task and the client libraries take most of the workload off our developers.

Our [browser-client](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/web-client/) can be used in all web applications in modern browsers and [React client](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/react/) makes development on React framework even easier.

For the iOS, we released the [iOS client](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/ios/) and our [Android client](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/android/) will be published very soon. After that, developers can easily build a unified voice user interface on all major platforms.

We have created a simple tutorial application for all of the client libraries for a gradual learning curve on all platforms.

## 3 Demos showcasing our technology

Speechly is a tool for building real-time voice functionalities that [integrate seamlessly](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) to existing touch or web user interfaces.

We [don’t think](/blog/real-time-voice-user-interfaces/) smart speakers or "voice-only” solutions is the best way to use voice and rather advocate multimodality and real-time visual feedback.

Some of the demos we built in 2020 include a [fashion eCommerce voice search filtering](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/) app and a classic [home automation](https://home-automation-app-demo.herokuapp.com/) app. Try them out!

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

## 4 Speechly Annotation Language features for configuring voice user interfaces

Our Speechly Annotation Language (SAL) is a syntax we use to annotate example utterances that are used to train our models. In 2020 we added many new features to SAL:

- Alphanumeric sequences
- Dates
- Permutations
- Multi-intent utterances
- Variables
- Canonical entities for easy handling of synonyms
- Lookup tables for handling large inventories

With these features, developers and designers can create complex voice user interfaces with a minimal amount of example utterances. Because the same model can be used on all platforms, the user experience is unified.

## 5 Improved latency in our GRPC API

When iPhone nailed the user experience with the touch screen, one of the key features was the very responsive user interface that reacted immediately to user input. This is a key issue also for voice user interfaces.

We’ve improved our latency in 2020 significantly and now we can proudly say that our API is real-time with tail latency of under 200 milliseconds.

Low latency is the key to intuitive user experience in two ways: first, it enables user to correct themselves naturally by using voice and second, it encourages the user to go on with the voice experience.

Compare this to the traditional smart speaker user experience that first starts by uttering a wake word that sometimes fails. Once the wake word is recognized and user starts speaking, they’ll know whether they were understood only after they have stopped speaking and the system has processed the input. If the answer is wrong, the user needs to start again from the beginning.

## 6 Speechly Dashboard

In March we published the first version of the Speechly Dashboard, a web application for building and configuring Spoken Language Understanding models with the Speechly Annotation Language.

The Dashboard supports nearly all Speechly features and it’s the fastest way for getting up to speed with our technology. Hundreds of developers have already created their models and tried them out in the Speechly Playground.

## 7 Other achievements

We’ve also published our [developer documentation](https://docs.speechly.com/), many [videos on using our technology](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvEar86D8CnD3zDJSydOdbA) and [command line tools](https://www.speechly.com/blog/configure-voice-ui-command-line/) for integrating Speechly to multi-user development workflows.

We renewed our website to better position our product and hired many new developers and machine learning experts. Our founders have been interviewed in many industry leading podcasts and we were nominated as one of the Europe’s Hottest Startups.

If you want to work with us and build awesome developer tools for next-generation voice user interfaces, please check our [careers page](https://www.speechly.com/careers/).

## What next?

Overall, we are pretty happy with our 2020. We’ve now built a technology stack that enables efficient user interfaces that improve user experience significantly. In 2021 we focus on showing the world some cool examples of our technology.


Our team made some great progress in 2020 in enabling all developers to become voice developers.

What Did the Speechly Team Achieve in 2020?


After years spent focused on our core technology and the recent introduction of our commercial product, we are thrilled to announce that we’ve been selected to join Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch.

Y Combinator (YC) is a startup accelerator headquartered in California. They got their start in 2005 and have since helped launch more than 3,000 companies, including Stripe, Reddit, DoorDash, Coinbase, Dropbox, and Instacart. Twice a year they select a handful of startups to invest in and support. The acceptance rate for the YC accelerator is between 1.5% - 2%, so to be selected is a huge honor and a testament to the work the team has put in over the years.

All companies get a [YC company profile listing](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/speechly) and access to an incredible network of founders and investors.

With our inclusion in the YC Winter ‘22 batch, Speechly is well positioned to continue to grow our footprint and expand our impact by bringing more experiences “powered by Speechly” to the marketplace. We’ll continue to work on our core technology and make improvements to the developer experience within our product. Our commitment to our users and to helping more people speak and feel heard, will now have the added support of the resources unlocked by YC.

It’s hard to believe that just a couple of years ago we were preparing to launch our commercial product into a world being completely reshaped by a pandemic. In the weeks and months since, we’ve found incredible levels of support from the voice technology community, our users, and of course, our greatest cheerleaders - our friends and family.

We would not be where we are today without the partnership, trust, and support of each of those people. We are grateful and looking forward to the next few months, as we dive headfirst into the work ahead.

We’ll be sharing our journey here on the blog, on [The Speechly Podcast](https://anchor.fm/the-speechly-podcast/episodes/The-Speechly-Podcast---Introduction-e15htlq), and of course [Twitter](https://twitter.com/speechlyapi), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/speechly/), and [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/speechlyapi). As always, it’s free to [start building](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard) with our API and you can connect directly with our product team on [GitHub](https://github.com/speechly/).

If you’re interested in being a part of the team, [check out our open roles](https://www.speechly.comhttps://www.speechly.com/careers/).


Speechly’s Reactive Voice User Interface API has been selected by the coveted startup accelerator

Speechly Joins Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 Batch


## Moderation needs in the metaverse

As Meta continues forward with their commitment to the growth of the metaverse, they’re also grappling with the reality that harassment in VR could turn mainstream consumers away. Their incoming CTO, Andrew Bosworth, referred to this as an [“existential threat”](https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-meta-andrew-bosworth-vr-toxic-metaverse-2021-11) to their plans for the metaverse expansion.

The threat is a very real one. Microsoft recently shuttered elements of their [AltspaceVR public social hubs](https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/microsoft-shutters-part-of-its-social-metaverse-for-safety-reasons/) and made plans to increase moderation to ensure that the platform is safe. Voice chat has been used to [sexually harass players using Oculus](https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/features/as-facebook-plans-the-metaverse-it-struggles-to-combat-harassment-in-vr/) for gaming. The potential for harm in these new spaces is obvious and the need for effective moderation solutions is clear.


## Real time voice audio offers new opportunities for harassment - and for AI powered moderation solutions

It’s important to note that this isn’t an issue that can be easily solved; Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt, wrote about what he calls [Masnick’s Impossibility Theorum](https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/). He argues that, “content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.” (It’s worth calling out that he still feels it’s something that needs to be done.)

What’s interesting about moderation in the metaverse is that you have multiple different modalities at play. People can talk to each other _and_ they can interact with each other through simulated touching and gesturing. Moderation must be occurring across both modalities in order to be effective and solutions for both should be flexible enough to allow them to work together in parallel, to provide additional context and improve the quality of the moderation efforts.

When people talk to each other, they’re listening not just to the words being said but to the way that they’re said. They observe the body language of the speaker. They know the context of the relationship with the speaker. All of these things factor into the way that the words spoken are processed and understood by the listener. For moderation purposes the **understanding** of all of these things together is key, and it has to be done accurately and **quickly. **Why? Because a recent survey found that [60% of kids and 83% of adults have experienced harassment](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/09/15/60-of-kids-experience-harassment-while-gaming-online-and-many-are-exposed-to-white-supremacy-survey-finds/?sh=39cfc0151f4e) in online multiplayer games. That is a huge human impact and the online gaming voice experiences offer a lot of parallels to the metaverse experience but now with new, more interactive, ways to cause harm.

This potential for harm is something that all of the big players in building out elements of the metaverse are aware of. If their platform does not have technology in place to help identify, investigate, and intervene in situations like this, their platform becomes a tool that harms people. That’s not good for people and it’s not good for business.

This space is interesting to the team at Speechly because the challenge posed is one that [our technology](https://www.speechly.com/technology) is uniquely positioned to help address. Ideally the technology would be deployed as a flexible chat moderation API with a custom model to suit each specific community and environment. The ability to simultaneously run automated speech recognition and natural language processing means that we’re able to help moderation systems respond faster, and with more accuracy.


## How Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support voice chat moderation

If you’ve ever read a transcript of a conversation, you know that it can leave a lot to be desired. The ability to create these transcriptions in real time as people are speaking is at the heart of what is needed for successful voice chat moderation. Then you add in the layers that bring it to life and the context and understanding necessary to determine if something was said that should be escalated.

Building AI powered models around things like sentiment analysis, volume fluctuations, and tone can all be used to help understand the context of what was said. Remember that in the metaverse, unless someone is streaming and recording the experience, harassment that is spoken leaves no “evidence” left behind. There’s no comment to screenshot, no profile to click to better identify the harasser. The experiences often move quickly and the harasser can quickly move on without any intervention. Unless. Unless there’s an AI layer built in to help identify, intercept, and intervene in real time.


## The future of voice chat moderation

As companies continue their push into new forms of multimodal online experiences in the metaverse, the need for effective moderation will only grow. The types of harassment will shift and expand along with the capabilities of the metaverse and the technology to monitor and moderate it will need to expand alongside it.

The sooner that AI powered models are deployed, the smarter and more effective the technology will become, and the better everyone’s experiences will be.

_Cover photo by Julia M Cameron on Pexels_

Why the future of the metaverse is dependent upon robust voice chat moderation APIs and AI technologies

The Case for Real Time Voice Chat Moderation Technology in the Metaverse


Voice can be the most efficient UI for Web and Mobile, but the back and forth conversational model needs to be ditched. The conversational model embodied by Voice Assistants does not take full advantage of screens that are native with web and mobile experiences. When you lean into the screen when building a Voice-enabled experience you can build fast and easy to use UIs that blend Voice and Touch/Type.

## Leveraging Screens with Voice UIs

Web and mobile User Interfaces (UIs) have a screen and that affordance should be used to  maximum effect. Voice input is very efficient, but an audio response like you find with Voice Assistants is not. The screen is more efficient for the output because it can react immediately to inputs and can convey far more information without it being too overbearing for the user. To get a sense about how much faster a Voice UI as a Feature can be compared to the Voice Assistant model, consider the use case of placing an order with Best Buy.

## Online Shopping Use Case: Best Buy

![Online shopping use case](bestbuy-speechly-usecase.png)

The graphic above shows 4 Best Buy purchase scenarios.  Starting with using Speechly to enable Voice as a Feature, the Mobile App, the Website, and the Alexa app. With twelve words spoken, Speechly can return a highly specific response in just nine seconds. It only involves a voice command from the user with an immediate visual response from the screen. By contrast, the same request took 2:04 minutes as an Alexa skill, included 19 turns in the conversation, and five errors (See video below). This shows in practice the speed that can be unlocked from Voice UIs as a Feature vs Voice Assistants, the main value prop discussed with Voice-enabled experiences.

<YouTube videoId="XJ4BnEIiAjo" />

But, is a Voice UI as a Feature better than an existing touch or mouse click interface? Even these highly streamlined Graphical User Interface (GUI) experiences can’t compete with a full-duplex Voice UI. Tapping in the Best Buy mobile app takes 33 seconds to complete the same purchase task and a mouse-driven GUI on the web took 37 seconds. That is 3-4 times slower than direct voice input.

## Value from Getting Voice UIs Right

When users can consistently get what they want by simply uttering a few words, they are likely to reward the company or brand with higher sales, more loyalty, and higher customer satisfaction. Also, by helping customers quickly get where they want you also see fewer abandoned carts and page bounces, resulting in higher conversion. The Speechly approach with Voice UIs as a Feature helps unlock and deliver those benefits consistently.

And using Voice to Filter through products is only 1 use case of a Voice UI. Other great features that span beyond E-commerce include Voice Search, Voice Form Filling, Voice Input, and Voice Command & Control which can all be demoed at [Speechly.com/demos](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/).

If you would like to learn more about the Speechly outlook on Voice UIs as a Feature vs Voice Assistants, download our full white paper on “Voice UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice UIs”.

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice&nbsp;UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice&nbsp;UIs"
  description="Learn how Voice UI features are outperforming Voice Assistants."
  filePath="/files/speechly-whitepaper-voice-uis-vs-conversational-voice-uis.pdf"
/>

_Cover photo by Florian Steciuk on Unsplash_

Abandoning the Voice Assistant model for a Voice UI as a Feature results in the most efficient UI since the Touchscreen.

The Fastest UI for the Web and Mobile


The [Reactive Voice UI](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-user-interfaces-examples/) paradigm is especially well suited for the web and mobile environments - really any experience with a touch screen.

In the marketplace today, many digital voice experiences follow the legacy voice assistant model, like the one popularized by Apple's Siri back in 2011. While these assistant driven voice UIs optimize for conversation, Reactive Voice UIs optimize for task completion. The bulk of voice assistant usage over the last decade has been reserved for single-utterance requests like, "play music" or "turn off the lights." In fact, the [2020 Smart Audio Report](https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com/insights/reports/smart-audio-report/) found that the top five tasks requested of voice assistants were to play music, get the weather, set a timer, check the time, and tell a joke. This is not surprising, given the amount of effort and time required to accomplish more complex tasks in a turn-based, conversational experience.

What do we mean by turn-based? The person and the AI assistant must take turns speaking in order to be understood. The person speaks, and only when they've stopped talking does the NLU kick in to process the spoken language input, determine the intent, and then return with a text-to-speech response. They each must wait for the other to respond before they're able to move forward. It's one-way, asynchronous communication.

As someone is trying to uncover what the assistant can do and is stumbling through everything it _can't_ do, it quickly becomes a time intensive back and forth conversation to reset. The frustration this can create is so a part of our cultural zeitgeist that Googling "yelling at Alexa" returns thousands of results.

It's a sequential waterfall process where the value is delivered at the very end. Likewise, any errors happen silently throughout the process, only to be surfaced at the end when it is too late to recover from them.

In the legacy voice assistant experiences, voice serves as both the UI and operating system. In the Reactive Voice UI design philosophy, voice serves a function as a feature alongside other modalities. The idea is not to substitute an existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) with voice but rather to complement or augment it along the parts of the user journey where a type and swipe input would otherwise be tedious. These include tasks like searching and inputting complex information.

Reactive Voice UIs are characterized by [multimodal UI](https://waracle.com/blog/mobile-app-development/why-multimodal-ui-is-the-future-of-mobile/) mechanics that enable voice input to generate a visual output. That means that the person can speak and see their words generate a reaction within the visual element directly, without an "assistant" managing the experience.

Whether using voice to search within a site, or [voice picking](https://www.speechly.com/solutions/logistics/) to manage inventory, the UI and the user are able to communicate with one another in both directions simultaneously. Despite not being a "conversation" it's a much more natural (and fast) way to communicate and get things done.

## Managing the Limitations of Artificial Intelligence in Voice Technologies

AI based product experiences have one thing in common: when they work, they're magical. When they fail, they fail catastrophically. For instance an autonomous driving experience: a magical experience is driving you safely from home to work. A catastrophic experience would be driving you off a cliff. With voice, a magical experience might be nailing a complex pizza order in one go. A catastrophic experience might be accidentally sending (and paying for) twenty pizzas to be delivered to your old address.

If you look at humans, we aren't that great at understanding spoken language. The typical human word error rate is around five percent. That means that if a sentence is ten words long you will have at least one word misunderstood in every other sentence. This tells you that verbal communication is very error prone to begin with.

However, what's different for humans is that these errors in understanding don't cost very much, as humans are able to quickly recover from them.

One big reason that voice AI experiences are still struggling to grow market share is that the mistakes in understanding often feel too costly. We can tackle this in two ways: either by trying to make the AI smarter and smarter, to the point where they won't make mistakes, or by trying to make the failures cost less. We at Speechly believe that the latter, more pragmatic approach, is the way to go.

If you're familiar with the principles of [modern software delivery](https://medium.com/the-value-maximizers/what-is-agile-ac19f79de430), this will likely be familiar to you:

> Succeeding in communication is about short cycles, incremental delivery, being iterative, failing fast, getting feedback, delivering value early, transparency and adaptation.

These same core principles apply to Reactive Voice UIs.

With Spoken Language Understanding™ technology and a visual Reactive Voice UI displayed on a screen, you can maintain a [fast feedback loop](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/). That means that you're able to deliver value early and enable quick recovery from errors in understanding. This keeps errors from compounding, helps build trust with the user, and makes the experience feel seamless.

## How to Convert an Alexa Skill into a Multi-Modal Experience

It takes an immense amount of work from a [conversational design](https://marvelapp.com/blog/principles-of-conversational-design/) and development perspective to build voice assistant experiences. These voice-only experiences are not bad - they are just limiting, from a user perspective. We built Speechly to offer up an alternative, one that starts with a focus on the user. If you've built an Alexa Skill and are interested in expanding its reach beyond the Amazon ecosystem, we created a [simple conversion tool](https://www.speechly.com/blog/introducing-alexa-to-speechly-conversion/) that lets you create a new Speechly application from an existing Alexa skill in a few simple steps. With these features folks can easily turn their Alexa skill into a streaming Speechly voice application that can then be used to enable Reactive Voice UI experiences across the web and in mobile apps.

It's free to start building: [https://docs.speechly.com/quick-start/](https://docs.speechly.com/quick-start/)

If you have questions, a specific use case or a POC you want to try out, our [inbox is open](mailto:hello@speechly.com).

_Cover photo by Tiger Lily on Pexels_


From Voice Search to Voice Picking, Reactive Voice UIs shine in web and mobile applications

The Importance of a Reactive Voice UI When Using Voice as an Interface 


Voice Assistant use has increased considerably over the past decade and has introduced many consumers to voice interaction. However, this model is actually not widely deployed. It seems very common because the tech giants have all introduced Voice Assistants and they are widely distributed through many of the most popular consumer devices, such as smartphones. However, there are many more Voice User Interfaces (UIs) deployed as a Feature in use today.


## Use Cases of Voice UIs as a Feature

### Navigation

Navigation apps are a good example where Voice is a UI Feature. There is no attempt at conversation and yet nearly all of them now have the ability to accept requests by voice. The natural language inputs are followed by a visual response. That could be information about the intended route, a map, or both.


### Banking

Banking apps provide another example. Erica from Bank of America, Eno from Capital One, U.S. Bank’s smart assistant, and Fargo from Wells Fargo all respond to inputs requested by Voice. None of them conduct multi-turn voice conversations. Why didn’t these companies simply replicate the model used by Alexa and Google Assistant? They didn’t need to. The Voice Input combined with a visual response was what added the most value to users.


### Music Streaming

Consider also the music streaming apps. Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify all offer Voice Search as a Feature for finding songs and to activate simple controls. While all of these implementations aside from Spotify are backed by Voice Assistants, they are still employed as simple, reactive Voice UIs. The audio response is typically just saying what song is about to play and then playing it - there is no back and forth conversation.


### Smart TVs

Voice UIs on smartphones work in a very similar way to Voice UIs for smart TVs. Cable and streaming television services are all adding Voice Search and Voice Commands for navigation and control. These solutions don’t pretend to make conversation. They respond to a request by loading information on a screen or by changing a television control based on the Voice Command. Voice UIs that simply respond to voice requests are actually far more common than Voice Assistants as a new Conversational Channel.


## Why Voice UI Features Have Outpaced Voice Assistants

The more prescient question is why so many of these companies are implementing Voice UIs of any kind. When it comes to mobile apps and mobile web, voice is more effective than touch-and-type interfaces. There is limited screen real estate to place buttons and thumb-typing is terribly inefficient. This is particularly true when you need to offer open-ended input (e.g. navigation/mapping and music streaming) or have a lot of features that are difficult to display in a simple menu (e.g. banking apps).

Voice UIs are also increasingly viewed as an accessibility feature for healthcare-related apps. It is a safety feature in cars where automakers want to offer an increasing number of features but endless menus can distract drivers. Touch and typing interfaces are not going away. However, they are increasingly being augmented by Voice UIs because of constraints, convenience, and changing consumer preferences.

On that final point, smart speakers, smart home products, and automobiles are playing a big role. There was a time when using your voice to control devices was uncommon. That is no longer true. Many people are using voice both at home and in the car. This is planting new habits around the use and expectation of Voice UIs in everyday digital interactions. It is no longer news when a smart home device or car adds a Voice Assistant. Nearly all of them support Voice UIs.


## Building Voice Features in Mobile and Web

This trend is continuing to expand into the mobile app space as well as the mobile web space, which is constantly adding new features to reach near parity with native mobile apps. And users want Voice UIs as a Feature as opposed to Voice Assistants, because they are a better match for user needs.

Speechly’s Voice Interface solution is aligned with these trends. If you want a full Voice Assistant, there are many solutions available from Big Tech, startups, and open source frameworks. However, the attention of developers, app and web publishers has shifted to solutions that can enable Voice UIs as a Feature.

Speechly offers a fast, accurate, and simple Voice UI API to build Voice Features fast. With Speechly any developer can be a Voice Developer.

In addition, Speechly delivers best-in-class responsiveness in terms of speed and has introduced a full duplex Voice Interface Solution for mobile, web, gaming, and the metaverse. There is no longer a need to wait for a Voice Assistant response. With Speechly, you can build solutions that simply react in real time to Voice Commands. And we are committed to providing the best Voice Interface solution for mobile app and web developers.


### Voice UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice UIs

There are limitations with the Voice Assistant model, however there are tangible opportunities for Voice UIs as a Feature in our Web, Mobile, Gaming, and Metaverse applications. If these opportunities are of interest to you, consider checking out our full white paper on “Voice UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice UIs”.

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice&nbsp;UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice&nbsp;UIs"
  description="Learn how Voice UI features are outperforming Voice Assistants."
  filePath="/files/speechly-whitepaper-voice-uis-vs-conversational-voice-uis.pdf"
/>

_Cover photo by Veri Ivanova on Unsplash_

Voice Assistants have received a lot of attention over the last few years, but Voice UIs as a Feature have delivered all the value and will continue to do so in Mobile, Web, Gaming, and the Metaverse.

The Inevitability of Voice UI Features


## Quick code example

Want to see how you can easily build a form that supports voice data entry? See our editable Codepen example [here](https://codepen.io/hheikinh/pen/eYvBQbX). To build something like that yourself, [sign up to Speechly](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/) and learn from the code or contact us.

## Speechly voice forms

Speechly is a tool for building voice user interfaces on any app or platform. It has been [used](/use-cases/) to build VR environments, mobile applications, [voice search experiences](/blog/voice-search/) in eCommerce, [warehouses](/blog/voice-picking/) and games.

Now one of our users had a web form in eCommerce domain that required a lot of clicking through and selecting. You know these forms that ask for date, category, gender, location, rating, job title, country, state and what not. Of course all in different input fields.

After you've filled them all you are presented with a captcha that you can never solve and you can't even speak of accessiblity.

Most websites have a HTML form or several forms. The information that needs to be input to these forms needs to be accurate and sometimes these forms need to be filled several times per session. This is the case for instance in search filters and many professional application, such as CRMs.

He had an idea whether that could be replaced by a voice form. And of course it can!

We spent a few hours and built the first demo by using our [Browser Client Libraray](https://github.com/speechly/browser-client/) and we were a bit shocked on how well it worked.

## Demo of a voice form

<YouTube videoId="YocJ4xGypYk" />

Multimodal Spoken Language Understanding works great for this kind of use case, because seeing the form gives user information on what kind of data they are expected to fill and the real-time feedback gives them information on whether they are being understood correctly. In case of an error, it's easy to correct with either natural language or by editing the form with touch.

Especially on mobile forms with many input forms are not that great to use. Selecting the correct field is hard, autocomplete Javascript libraries often work badly and scrolling through endless list to find your country is not that fun. All these problems are easily solved by voice forms.

Voice also improves accessibility, enables use on-the-go and while driving.

Another example of our voice form solution is a demo for CRM data input. [Professional applications are a great use case for voice](/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/) user interfaces, because there's no need for onboarding and the language used by users is accurate and exact.

In this demo, a sales professional has a typical CRM task of filling information for a prospect. As with most CRMs, they fill email, phone number, sales status and deal value along with some tasks and notes about the last contact they've had.

<YouTube videoId="6GcgPcMOuQk" />

On the other hand, even if you have never used the form, it's easy to control it by voice. After all, you see the questions on your screen so you already know exactly what information the form needs.

Speechly supports various standard entity types such as dates, phone numbers, product codes and email addresses to make it simple to input often used data types.

And even if you have data that is hard to fill by voice, the user can use voice to fill the parts of the form that are easiest to fill by voice and type the parts that are easier to type. Or if they make a mistake, it can be corrected by clicking and typing.

It also reduces spam automatically. If someone actually filled a part of the form by using voice, you can be pretty sure it's not a bot. This improves accessibility further, because [captchas can be very difficult to fill](https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Captcha_Alternatives_and_thoughts) for differently abled people.

The best part is that it requires no breaking changes to your existing form. We used a web form from an airlines website for this demo and still managed to do this in just a few hours. If someone still wants to use your form like they have used to, that's totally fine. It'll just add a new, easier way for filling your forms.

And did I mention it's pretty easy to do? Well it is. You create a configuration with our [SAL language](/docs/slu-examples/editing-slu-examples/) and use our client library to map the correct intents and entities to your form and you are good to go. For integrating Speechly to your application, you can refer to this [code example](https://codepen.io/hheikinh/pen/eYvBQbX).

For best practices on building amazing voice experiences, refer to our [Design Guidelines](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/)

If you are interested in making your web forms voice-enabled, [contact us](/contact)!

## Benefits of a voice form built with Speechly

- Fast to integrate
- Works on any web form
- Full support for web standards
- Users can use natural language to fill the form
- Supports most common data types out of the box: email, dates, phone numbers, product codes etc
- Minimizes spam; if someone uses voice to fill your form, you can safely skip Captchas
- Is multi-modal; user can switch between using touch, typing and voice based on the task


Hate clicking through endless web forms? Speechly can be used to turn any web form into a voice form.

Turn Any Web Form into a Voice Form


**Voice User Interfaces (Voice UIs) often refer to UIs that use voice both for user input and output. Voice UIs are typically built to enable a more efficient user experience. However, we frequently run into problems with voice-only UIs that result in confusion and frustration for users.**

At Speechly, we believe that many of the problems that exist with Voice UIs today can be mitigated or completely eliminated by adopting a multi-modal design philosophy. This means leveraging all the available modalities (voice, visual, touch) of the user's context to make the user interaction as easy and smooth as possible. One of the most fascinating platforms for multi-modal Voice UIs is the web, but if you look for design patterns for adding voice features to web applications, you will quickly realize a lack of quality resources.

To make designing and developing Voice UIs on the web easier, we are excited to release some of our research on this topic as a set of ready made UI components. These components can be used to give visual cues to users that the Voice UI is working as expected.

<YouTube videoId="HIgl7B37Jlc" />

## 4 UI Components for Voice UIs

- **[Push-To-Talk Button](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/ui-components/push-to-talk-button/)** is a holdable switch for controlling the Voice User Interface.
- **[Big Transcript](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/ui-components/big-transcript/)** is an overlay-style component that displays the real-time speech-to-text transcript and feedback to the user.
- **[Transcript Drawer](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/ui-components/transcript-drawer/)** is an alternative for Big Transcript that slides down from the top of the viewport. It displays usage tips along with the real-time speech-to-text transcript and feedback.
- **[Error Panel](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/ui-components/error-panel/)** displays recovery instructions for common voice-related problems.

## Our Multi-Modal Design Philosophy helps design better voice-enabled user interfaces

We believe most of the problems that face Voice UIs can be overcome with a multi-modal design philosophy. Below is the multi-modal design philosophy we embody at Speechly. This [Design Philosophy Guide](https://docs.speechly.com/design-philosophy/) should be used as a complimentary resource with the UI components above when designing or developing a Voice UI.

### Chapter 1: Setting the right context

- Resist the temptation to build an assistant.
- Design the interactions around _command & control_, not conversation
- Give visual guidance on what the user can say
- Use voice ONLY for the tasks it is good for

### Chapter 2: Receiving commands from the user

- Onboard the user
- When a pressable button is available wake word is not needed
- Prefer a push-to-talk button mechanism
- Signal clearly when the microphone button is pushed down

### Chapter 3: Giving feedback to the user

- Use non-interruptive modalities for feedback
- Minimize latency with [Streaming Spoken Language Understanding](https://www.speechly.com/technology/)
- Steer user’s gaze and visual attention
- Minimize visual unrest in triggered events

### Chapter 4: Recovering from mistakes

- Show the text transcript in real time
- Enable corrections both verbally and by using touch
- Offer an alternative way to complete the task using touch

## Free Voice UI Components for Download

You can find more information about these UI components inside our documentation. If you would like to access the Speechly UI component design files, they are now available in Figma and Sketch for download.

- [Speechly UI components and layout templates in Figma](https://www.figma.com/file/CqXMKQX6LNSnSai00P5xbz)
- [Download Speechly UI Components and layout templates for Sketch](https://speechly.github.io/speechly-ui-assets/speechly-ui.sketch)
- [UI components in docs.speechly.com](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/ui-components/)

If you have any questions on how to best take advantage of our Voice UI components, please feel free to reach out to the team at design@speechly.com.


Ready-made UI components make development of Voice UIs faster.

UI Components for Voice UIs in the Web


When companies integrate voice technology, most will default to think of generalized Voice Assistant platforms like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. This mindshare has been earned by Big Tech and the innovation they have pushed forward in voice technology, however a lot has changed since Siri was announced in [2011](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/10/04Apple-Launches-iPhone-4S-iOS-5-iCloud/) or Alexa in [2014](https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/06/amazon-echo/).

A major evolution is the alternative options businesses have to integrate [voice technology](/categories/voice-tech/), outside of the Big Tech providers. The purpose of this post is to understand the true value of domain ownership when integrating voice technology. In order to do this we need to first understand some of the risks associated with building voice technology alongside Big Tech and two optimal alternatives for integrating voice technology.

## Risk to Build

There are risks that need to be paid attention to when assessing the value of [building a voice experience](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/) using a legacy technology [Voice Assistant platform](/blog/why-smart-speakers-are-not-the-future-of-voice/) like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. The obvious threat that comes to mind is data. Handing over relevant customer data to the largest companies in the world with nearly infinite resources should be enough reason to raise caution.

Companies should also consider the control of their experience with their end customer. Generalized Assistant platforms offer voice technology to developers, so long as they are willing to operate within their specified domains of interest like smart speakers and smart home automation. While building out these new platforms might be a top priority for a company like Amazon, it ignores if this is the best place to build a valuable voice experience for your customer. Product teams should ultimately decide where a voice technology may fit within existing digital experiences to solve an end user problem.

A company’s brand should also be paid attention to. When looking at a company's brand, there is a gatekeeper to generalized Voice Assistant platforms in the form of a [wake word](https://www.speechly.com/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/). It is challenging to build brand awareness when you have to insert another company's name before getting to your brand's experience. There is also long term risk with developing a new user behavior for your product and potentially associating that product with a Big Tech company.

The risks mentioned above should be considered by companies looking to integrate voice technology, from startups to Fortune 500 brands. While the underlying voice technology large internet companies have brought to market and popularized is truly innovative, the reality is there are other providers outside of these players that companies should be aware of and consider.

# Alternatives

There are a few pieces of core technology that power the voice experiences people are familiar with today, such as Speech-To-Text (STT) for quickly speaking text messages or Natural Language Understanding (NLU) that tries to actually understand the intent of what a user is saying. The two most relevant alternatives to building a voice experience on a Generalized Voice Assistant platform are Independent or “Owned Assistants” and Voice Manipulated User Interfaces or “Voice UI”. These alternatives leverage a handful of different core voice technologies, such as STT and NLU mentioned above.

Owned Assistants are similar in nature to generalized assistants, as it relates to the end user experience. They are able to provide a conversational experience, however they are able to build this assistant experience within an existing mobile application or website. This can be a good alternative for brands who want a conversational experience without the risks mentioned above. However, there are natural complexities with approaching voice technology in a “conversational” manner.

The other alternative to a generalized assistant is a Voice UI. With a Voice UI, voice input can be used as an additional option to manipulate the graphical elements of a UI just like clicking, tapping, swiping and typing. Looking at voice technology from this perspective, you can think about where voice as an input can be a tool in solving end user problems without ignoring the other benefits of a rich UI.

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

The goal of this post is not to debate Owned Assistants vs Voice UIs, rather focus on the Value of Domain Ownership when integrating voice technology.

# Domain Ownership Value

**Brand Control**

Using a wake word to launch a voice assistant was popularized by Apple’s Siri. One could argue simple access to voice control via a wake word has been one of the key drivers in voice technology adoption across the globe. However, just because something has always been done a certain way does not mean it has to be done forever into the future. Integrating voice into your existing domains allows you to control your brand messaging. Some scenarios may call for a branded wake word while others may benefit from voice input alongside a tap of a screen or touch of a button. More attention should be given to training a brand’s end users to say a wake word with a Big Tech brand while building out new user behavior with voice technology.

**Experience Control**

If you look at existing digital domains like a website or mobile application as a starting point for integrating voice technology, it gives you the ability to better control the end user experience. We are still in the early innings as it relates to voice as an input for technology. Sure, we are familiar with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) call center experiences of “Say 1 for X”, but the underlying technology powering voice experiences today has come a long way. Pair this innovation in voice technology with a rich UI and it makes for a perfect relationship.

Innovation in far-field voice technology, specifically with the announcement of Alexa in 2014, pulled general attention away from designing best practices for voice as an input in websites and mobile applications and more towards figuring out smart speakers. There is a real opportunity for companies to reset their outlook with voice technology and realize the power of voice within existing digital domains. These domains provide a perfect opportunity for companies to establish best practices for solving end user problems with a voice UI or Owned Assistant while also giving the ability to fully control the evolution of their end users experience with voice technology.

**Data Control**

Building quality end user experiences with voice technology requires a lot of data. Handing over valuable customer data to take advantage of an emerging platform can be a tough decision to make. Integrating voice technology into existing domains allows companies to maintain control of their valuable customer data, while still being able to take advantage of the innovation in voice technology.

This applies to an initial integration of voice technology, but also is important when thinking into the future. It is hard to guess the trajectory of any emerging technology or user behavior. However, you have a better chance of iterating and using the technology to build a valuable experience if you have full access to the usage data. Business interests in creating valuable end user experiences and Big Tech’s interest in solving Generalized AI are at odds when it comes to this valuable user data. The only way to get truly raw access to this end user data is by integrating voice technology within an existing digital domain.

Speechly is paving the way in giving product teams the ability to [unlock end user value](/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/) with Voice UI’s. If you are interested in learning more please [reach out to us](https://www.speechly.com/contact).


Learn the true value of domain ownership when using voice technologies

Value of Domain Ownership With Voice Technology


For the past 5 years at Speechly, we have been researching and developing tools to easily add Fast, Accurate, and Simple Voice User Interfaces (Voice UIs) in Mobile, Web, and Ecommerce experiences. In this article, we'll introduce the concepts and guidelines we've found effective in creating Multi-Modal Voice experiences that enable users to complete tasks efficiently and effectively.

At Speechly, we approach Voice as an Interface. We believe Voice UIs should blend alongside existing modalities - like typing, tapping, and swiping - and take advantage of a visual display for providing real-time feedback to the user. As a result, a Speechly powered website/app can be controlled with both the [Voice UI](/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/) and the Graphical User Interface (GUI), allowing the user to choose the best input method for the occasion. You can also think of a Voice UI as a controller for app actions which makes it [retrofittable to an existing application](/blog/voice-user-interfaces-for-react/).

We contrast the “Speechly Model” to the popular “Voice Assistant Model” for Voice UIs seen in products like Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa. All of these experiences are conversational in nature, optimized for hands-free use with voice, and overlook the best uses of a Voice UI in a Multi-Modal context.

## Setting the right context

### 1. Don't build a Voice Assistant

Voice Assistants are digital assistants that are built for “Conversational Experiences” - where the user speaks a Voice Command and the system typically utters back a Voice Response. Certain hand’s free scenarios can be a good fit for the Voice Assistant model, such as IVR within Contact Centers, but it is not the best model when a user has access to a screen.

Instead of back and forth “Conversational Experiences”, Multi-Modal voice experiences should be based on real-time visual feedback. As the user speaks, the user interface should be instantaneously updated.

### 2. Design for Command & Control

When humans talk with each other, we do more than transmit information by using words. We use different tones and emotions to give different meanings to our words depending on the context of a situation. This is very human-like, but not the way we want to communicate with a computer.

With a Multi-Modal Voice UI, speech has only one function: Command and Control the system to do what the user wants. Be clear that the user is talking with a computer, don’t try to imitate a human. In most cases, the application should not answer in natural language. It should react by updating the user interface, just like when clicking a button or making a search.

### 3. Give visual guidance on what the user can say

<YouTube videoId="XWqHV1a32LM" />

An issue commonly described by users of Voice UIs is the uncertainty related to what commands are supported. Within the Voice Assistant context, this arises from the mission of General Voice Assistant platforms to create an all knowing Assistant.

Understanding the supported functionality with traditional GUIs is less of a problem. Placing a button in the user's shopping cart that reads “Proceed to Checkout” is a very strong signal to the user that checkout is supported and by pressing the button the user will indeed proceed to the checkout process. This aspect is missing from Voice-Only solutions and is a strong benefit for Multi-Modal Voice UIs.

### 4. Use voice ONLY for the tasks it's good for

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

Good design is about providing the user with the easiest tools for completing a task.

Voice works great for use cases such as [Voice Search](/blog/voice-search/) – “Show me the nearest seafood restaurants with three or more stars”, [Voice Input](https://youtu.be/XJ4BnEIiAjo?t=313) – “Add milk, bread, chicken and potatoes”, and [Voice Command & Control](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD0gleP7Sxc&ab_channel=Speechly) - “Show sports news” or “Turn off all lights except the bedroom”.

On the other hand, touch is often the better option for quickly selecting from a couple of options.

There’s no need to replace your current user interface with an Assistant based Voice UI. A Multi-Modal Voice UI should blend as a UI Feature alongside existing modalities like typing, tapping, or swiping. Rather you should evaluate which tasks in your application are the most tedious and easiest to do by using your voice.

## Receiving commands from the user

### 5. Onboard the user

When a user sees a Voice UI for the first time, they will need some guidance on how to use it.

Guidance tips should be placed close to where the visual feedback will appear. You can hide the tips after the user has tried the Voice UI.

### 6. Avoid using a wake word

While voice assistants use a wake word so that they can be activated from a distance, your mobile or desktop application doesn’t need to. The hands free scenario is less relevant than you might initially think, as the user is already holding or within close proximity to a device. There are also privacy risks that are inherent with a Wake Word that are altogether avoided.

### 7. Use a Push-to-Talk button

Push-to-Talk (Button on Screen or Physical Key/Button on Device) is the best way to operate a microphone in an application with a Multi-Modal Voice UI. When the user is required to press a button while talking, it’s completely clear when the application is listening. This also decreases latency by making endpointing very explicit, eliminating the possibility of endpoint false positives (system stops listening prematurely) and false negatives (systems does not finalize request after the user has finished the command).

On the desktop you can use the spacebar for activating the microphone.

You can also add a slide as an optional gesture to lock the microphone for a longer period of time. WhatsApp has a good implementation of the design in their app.

### 8. Signal clearly when the microphone button is pushed down.

To make sure the user knows that the application is listening, signal clearly when the microphone button is pushed down. This is especially important when using the Push-to-Talk pattern.

You can use sound, animation, tactile feedback (vibration) or a combination to signal the activation. On a handheld touch screen device, make sure that the activated microphone icon is visible from behind the thumb when Push-to-Talk is activated.

## Giving feedback to the user

### 9. Use non-interruptive modalities for feedback

Non-interruptive modalities include haptic, non-linguistic auditory, and perhaps most importantly visual feedback. Using these modalities, the application can react fast and without interruption to the user. For instance, in the case of “I’m interested in t-shirts,” the UI would swiftly show the most popular t-shirt products, instantly enabling the user to continue with a refining utterance such as, ”do you have Boss.” This narrows down the displayed products to show only the Boss branded t-shirts.

On the other hand, using a voice response makes this experience complicated for the user as any ongoing user utterance will be abruptly interrupted. Voice Response is also a slow channel for transmitting information and for returning users, hearing the same speech synthesis can lead to a worse user experience over time.

### 10. Minimize latency with Spoken Language Understanding

One important part of user experience is the perceived responsiveness of the application. Designers are using tricks such as lazy loading, doing tasks on background, visual illusions and preloading of content to make their applications seem faster and this should be done with Voice UIs, too.

In Voice-Enabled applications, immediate UI reaction is even more important. Immediate UI reaction encourages the user to use longer utterances and to continue the voice experience. In case of an error, it enables the user to recover fast.

### 11. Steer user’s gaze and minimize visual unrest

When using voice effectively the user can control the UI an order of magnitude faster compared to tapping and clicking. This means there can be a lot of visual activity happening in the UI. It is important that the user can keep up with these UI reactions and understand the feedback.

Typically UI reactions manifest themselves in some sort of visual queues, micro animations and transitions. There is an instinctive inclination in the human visual cognition system to move visual focus to where movement is happening.

Therefore it is an antipattern to scatter UI reactions all over the visual field of the user, e.g. streaming transcription animation on top of the screen and other ui reactions at the bottom of the screen. This will result in the user's gaze bouncing back and forth on the screen making it nearly impossible to understand what is happening in the UI.

For this reason it is important to either centralize all visual UI reactions near one focal point, meaning that both the transcript as well as the visual transitions resulting from the Voice commands are shown very close to each other. The other option is to steer the user's gaze linearly on the screen with a cascade of animations happening either top to down or left to right.

Also, while a Voice UI needs to be as close to real-time as possible, you need to minimize flicker and visual unrest. You can use placeholder images and elements to make sure the application looks smooth and reacts fast.

## Recovering from mistakes

### 12. Show the transcript

Text transcription of a users voice input is the most important variable of feedback in case of an error. Lack of action tells the user their input was not correctly understood, but in case of an error in the Speech Recognition, the transcript can enable them to understand what went wrong quickly.

Transcripts can also be valuable for the user when everything goes right. It tells the user they are being understood and encourages them to continue with longer utterances. If you are using Speechly, you can use the tentative transcript to minimise feedback latency.

### 13. Produce results fast, but offer opportunity to correct

Natural Language Understanding is hard for many reasons. In addition to the Speech Recognition failing, the user can hesitate or mix up their words. This can lead into errors, just like a misclick can lead to errors with a GUI.

While there are multiple ways to reduce the amount of errors, the most important thing is to offer the user an opportunity to correct themselves quickly. Produce the best guess for correct action as quickly as possible and let the user refine that selection by either voice or touch.

### 14. Have an intent for verbal corrections

When users give long Voice Commands there is a higher likelihood that the user will make an error in their speech. This is not a problem if the users get real-time feedback and can correct themselves naturally.

Multimodality enables users to use the GUI to correct themselves, but make sure to include an intent for verbal corrections as well. This makes it possible for users to say something like “Show me green, sorry I mean red t-shirts” without “failure”.

### 15. Offer alternative ways to complete tasks without Voice

Another way to make corrections is with touch/click. Touch/click corrections are done best by offering the user a short list of viable options based on what they have said or done earlier.

If your user is filling a form by using voice commands, for example, they might only need to correct one field. It can be the most intuitive to tap the correct field and make the correction by using touch. Make sure you support both ways for corrections!

The big issue with voice assistants is that they are hard to use by touch. While voice is a great UI for many use cases, sometimes it’s not feasible. This is why all features in your application should be usable with both voice and touch. For example, you can use traditional search filtering with dropdown menus and include a microphone for using the filters by voice. This enables users to choose the modality that is best for the task at hand.

_Originally published November 27, 2020, updated November 10, 2021_


In this article, we'll introduce the guidelines and best practices for creating websites & applications with Multi-Modal Voice User Interfaces.

Speechly Guidelines for Creating Productive Voice-Enabled Apps


We organized a breakfast event in London on the 28th of January under the title “The Future of Voice in eCommerce – Beyond Smart Speakers”. The event was an intimate round table event with about a dozen industry leaders from leading retailers and eCommerce players.

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice & the Grocery Industry"
  description="Learn how voice is changing the way people shop for groceries."
  filePath="/files/grocery-voice-speechly-web.pdf"
/>

We organized the event for a few key reasons:

1. We wanted to bring together a carefully selected retail industry expert group interested in voice technologies to discuss and share views on how this new technology can be harnessed to improve the customer experience and drive sales

2. We wanted to showcase some of the voice enabled services that have been built on top of the Speechly Spoken Language Understanding platform for leading eCommerce players, especially in the grocery vertical. Many consider our solution the next generation of voice shopping, and we wanted to provide industry professionals the opportunity to experience it for themselves.

3. We also wanted to gain better understanding on what are the issues holding eCommerce retailers back from adopting voice to their services and what kind of plans do they have for voice in the near future.

In the event, two leading European grocery retailers S Group (#1 in Finland) and Musgrave (#1 in Ireland) demoed their live applications powered by the Speechly Spoken Language Understanding technology. The demos were followed up with active discussion by the participants and the feedback for the presentations was great. It seems that retailers agree that when the voice shopping experience can be made so simple and easy that “even my mother” can use it, it is obvious that it creates a lot of value for the end users and helps differentiate the brand. You can read more about the solutions we have built for [grocery retailers](/blog/grocery-ecommerce-user-experience/).

Even more interesting were the discussions we had with our distinguished guests. Some highlights from the presentations and discussions:

- Across eCommerce verticals there seemed to be a clear shared understanding that voice change how customers will shop in the future. Voice is already a key part of leading eCommerce players’ user experience plans in the short to mid term. Most companies had projects active in this space.

- Current smart speaker solutions are good for getting initial feedback from users about the feasibility of voice, but fall short when building something more serious. Especially if the average basket consists of more than a few products, or the products are specifically complicated managing it with smart speakers is too complicated for the end users.

- Because of the nature of the medium, the difference between a good and bad voice user experience is immense. While a good voice experience is natural, human-like and fast a bad voice experience can be confusing, slow and can hurt brand experience. Voice technology has only recently developed enough to support natural, real-time experience.

- When intuitive voice experiences that work well are offered to users, they embrace them. One of the applications demoed had a NPS score of 49 and users used it on average 5,12 times per week. 86% of users confirmed that it saves their time and effort.
- An interesting insight from the demographic usage data of one of the applications was that voice technologies can actually reach customer segments that normally wouldn’t be doing online shopping. So voice technology actually provides an opportunity for retailers to convert otherwise non-tech-savvy segments into online shopping.

- The benefits of voice user interfaces are not limited to just shoppers and the shopping experience. Relevant use cases had been identified and piloted for example within contact centers and warehouse operations.

Learn more about the event by watching the presentation slides below.

### Otto Söderlund and Hannes Heikinheimo: Evolution, revolution and the future of voice

<YouTube videoId="Cz_4PiMVVmo" />

Slideshare: [Future of Voice in eCommerce. Beyond Smart Speakers](https://www.slideshare.net/ottomatias/future-of-voice-in-ecommerce-beyond-smart-speakers)

### Harri Laaksonen, S Group: Case S Group - How we improved our mobile grocery shopping experience by using speech

<YouTube videoId="j3u27J7aq_Y" />

Slideshare: [Using Voice to Improve Grocery Shopping Experience](https://www.slideshare.net/ottomatias/future-of-voice-in-ecommerce-voice-shopping-at-s-group-speechly)

### Neill Mullally, Musgrave: Our vision of voice and experiences from online voice shopping

<YouTube videoId="4VbVndYgWzo" />

Slideshare: [Future of Voice in eCommerce. Voice Shopping at Musgrave](https://www.slideshare.net/ottomatias/future-of-voice-in-ecommerce-voice-shopping-at-musgrave-speechly-226788241)

We were really happy with the event and it seemed our guests found it very interesting, too. We will be sharing more insights about the event and presentation videos next week. Stay tuned and thanks again to everyone who participated in the event!

In case you missed the event and would still like to hear about how voice technology can improve user experience in e-Commerce, drop us a mail at [hello@speechly.com](mailto:hello@speechly.com) and we’ll get back to you. If you want to hear about our future events, make sure to follow us on social media, too.


Learn how our guests realized the benefits of next-generation voice user interfaces for e-Commerce and how voice technology can improve customer experience and efficiency in retail industry.

Future of Voice for e-Commerce - Key findings from our event


Voice technology is moving fast and old insights turn bad quickly. Here we have collected some of the freshest and most interesting insights from various voice related surveys and researches.

The pandemic has certainly affected voice tech, too, and germs-free is quickly becoming more important than overall hands-free.

![Reasons for using voice](reasons-for-using-voice.png)

## 2020

Adobe published their **2020 Voice Survey** which contains a lot of interesting data points about voice tech. You can find the full report [here](https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/principles/emerging-technology/voice-technologys-role-in-rapidly-changing-world/). Some of the most interesting insights include:

- 31% of voice users count sanitation as a benefit of voice tech

- 37% would use voice user interface to check bank balance

- 29% would use voice to book doctor's appoitment (in fact, we have created a configuration for such use case. You can see a demo [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSi7vJuIyT0))

- 28% would request grocery delivery by voice (you can read more about voice and grocery shopping [here](https://www.speechly.com/blog/grocery-ecommerce-user-experience/))

- 18% of users currently use voice for using health and fitness apps

- 86% says voice tech could make business/events more sanitary. This figure has increased significantly due to the pandemic.

- As you can imagine, home automation is a common use case for voice: 56% of users would open door with voice, 55% would use elevator controls and 49% vending machine controls. We have built our home automation demo, too and you can try it out [here](https://home-automation-app-demo.herokuapp.com/)

- Only one in four use voice beyond simple searches (52% for maps/driving, 51% for text and chat and 46% for music control). This might partly do with the fact that voice search is not available in most applications and websites. Read about our approach to voice search [here](/blog/voice-search/)

- 57% say that better understanding of voice tech would cause them to use voice more. We see voice still having kind of a chicken-egg -problem, where efficient and natural user experiences are still rare and hence not many developers think of adding voice features to their apps. When we start seeing first really well working examples, voice will quickly become a dominant user interaction modality

- 62% feel awkward using voice with others present. This is why voice-only solutions do not work. The user should have the ability to switch between voice and other interaction modalities seamlessly.

- Skill discovery is still a problem with legacy voice platforms and the amount of users who do not know how to complete a task with voice tech went up 14% year-over-year. Onboarding users to voice is very important

- 49% of respondents to Adobe survey predict that by 2025 voice will be better able to suit their needs

eMarketer released some interesting data points. In their [research](https://www.emarketer.com/content/voice-assistant-use-reaches-critical-mass) the key takeaway is that voice assistants have reacthed the critical mass:

- There's 128 million monthly active users in the US for voice assistants. This amounts to almost 40% of all US internet users and one third of the overall population

- Smartphones and smart speakers are the most popular voice assistant devices

In the report, eMarketer mentions:

> Over time, we expect the number of voice-assistant users to rise even further as the software finds its way into more devices, including cars, wearables, smart TVs, appliances and other connected gadgets.

Supporting eMarketer research, [Gartner's Intelligence Report: Optimizing Voice Search and Features for Mobile Commerce](https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/marketing/documents/intelligence-report-optimizing-voice-search-and-features-for-mobile-commerce-excerpt.pdf) finds that:

- 26% use smart speakers and voice assistants at least once a week

- 39% of US population uses voice features on their smartphones

- But still, only 15% of brands analyzed provide voice search on mobile apps. Based on our research, this has to do with the fact that there hasn't prveiously been good developer tools available for such experiences.

- While mobile commerce and voice is a match made in heaven, 90% of consumers do not use smart speaker to shop. This probably has to do with problems in product discovery with voice-only assistants

- Hands-free is obviously one great benefit for voice tech and 32% of respondents reporterd interested in hands-free voice tech.

SoundHound conducted [a research on the business value of voice assistants](https://voices.soundhound.com/pdfs/voice-AI-research-report.pdf). Some interesting facts in that research include:

- 84% of respondents are deploying voice assistants to mobile apps, compared to 54% on smart speakers. Voice is moving away from dedicated devices and will rather become a part of all digital experiences.

- The most common business functions to offer voice solutions are customer service (81%), sales (52%), store operations and marketing (38%). IT and HR have the lowest voice adoption with 6% and 3% respectively.

- Perceived end-user benefits of voice include better customer experience, customer satisfaction, hands-free access and faster. You can read about the advantages of voice user interfaces in [this artlcle](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/)

![End user benefits for voice](end-user-benefits-for-voice.png)

- [Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134244/barriers-to-voice-technology-adoption-worldwide/) made researcch on barriers for voice adotion. It's interesting to see that up to 73% of respondents see accuracy being the biggest adoption for voice tech. 38% of respondents see complexity of deployment and integration as the being a barrier.

Speechly can help in both fronts. Our speech recognition technology is without customization [on par with the leading voice providers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hcdCrFl-MQ&ab_channel=Speechly) and by customizing the models for the specific acoustic environment or vocabulary, we can get even better results.

![Barriers for voice adoption](barriers-for-voice-adoption.png)

- Another [research by Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/973815/worldwide-digital-voice-assistant-in-use/) mentions that worldwide there's 4.2 billion voice assistant devices in use.

- [Gartner](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-01-09-gartner-predicts-25-percent-of-digital-workers-will-u#:~:text=By%202021%2C%20Gartner%2C%20Inc.,than%202%20percent%20in%202019.) finds one fourth of digital workers using a virtual employee assist by 2021.

- [Capgemini](https://www.capgemini.com/ch-en/2020/07/the-day-after-rethinking-business/) mentions 77% of consumers intending to increase their use of touchless technologies – and that the rate of use of online sales will increase by 30% by the end of 2020. Another proof for voice having a larger role in post-pandemic world

## Other facts

- In 2019, voice search was worth $2 Billion USD according to [WebFX](https://www.webfx.com/voice-search-content-optimization-service.html#:~:text=Transparent%20voice%20search%20optimization%20services,services%20that%20maximize%20your%20revenue.). Once voice search enters mobile devices and websites, this figure will most probably be a lot bigger

- In fact, already two years ago, one third of US population was using voice search according to [eMarketer](https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-voice-assistant-users-2019)

- [BrightLocal](https://www.brightlocal.com/research/voice-search-for-local-business-study/) finds that men are 30% more likely than women to use voice search. It might have to do with the fact that voice recognition has had [significant race and gender biases](https://hbr.org/2019/05/voice-recognition-still-has-significant-race-and-gender-biases)

- [Juniper Research estimated in 2018](https://www.juniperresearch.comhttps://www.speechly.com/press/press-releases/digital-voice-assistants-in-use-to-8-million-2023) that by 2023 there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use. The same report finds that voice commerce will reach $80 billion per annum by the same year

- According to consulting powerhouse [PWC](https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/voice-assistants.html), 57% of users use voice monthly rather than typing when searching something. No wonder, as voice is up to four times faster than typing on a smart phone

- [Narvar](https://see.narvar.com/2018-04-09-GLO-EN-WebContent-eBook-Connecting-with-Shoppers-Consumer-Report_2018-Report-Connecting-with-Shoppers-EN---PDF-LP.html) finds the age group 45-60 being the fastest growing segment for voice shopping. This is inline with our own research for users for a Speechly-powered grocery shopping application. For that application, the amount of over 40-years-old was significantly higher than for legacy shopping experiences without voice functionalities


The freshest and most interesting voice technology insights for 2021

Insights and Statistics on Voice Technology


Voice picking has been employed for decades. But only recently have technologies such as Speechly’s Spoken Language Understanding enabled intuitive and accurate real-time voice-user interfaces that maximize efficiency with minimal customization and development time.

## What is voice picking?

Voice-directed warehousing (VDW), voice picking, pick by voice, voice-enabled warehouses, and speech-based picking all refer to the same thing. It’s a paperless, hands-free, and eyes-free computer system that employs voice commands for warehouse processes.

Warehouses have been frontrunners in using voice technology in [improving workforce efficiency](https://www.speechly.com/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/). Voice picking has been used at least since the early 1990s, but recently the technology has matured enough to make other technologies almost obsolete. The market is expected to grow significantly over the coming years, due to decreasing costs and improved accuracy.

Voice-directed warehouses typically use a [multimodal](https://www.speechly.com/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/) voice user interface that can both direct the operator and take commands from the operator using voice. However, many warehouse operators use the voice-user interface only for data input from the operator to the system, and the information from the system to the operator is shown visually on their screen.

Voice-directed warehousing is well-suited for keeping an operator's hands and eyes free, allowing them to focus more on the task at hand.

It can be used in all kinds of storage environments; freezing and noisy environments are not a problem for Speechly’s voice technology. It can be used in warehouses with a large and small number of SKUs alike, and can be adapted to any process.

## How does voice picking work?

In a voice-directed warehouse (VDW), operators are equipped with a device, often a mobile phone, tablet, or a voice-dedicated terminal and headset. Typically, the headset is equipped with noise-canceling features for better performance in loud environments. In addition to voice and touch, the device can also support RFID and barcodes for increased efficiency in certain situations.

Modern voice picking employs speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies for improved accuracy and intuitiveness. Speechly has a unique approach to these technologies by combining these processes into a Spoken Language Understanding system that returns accurate results for voice commands in real time.

When an employee starts their shift, orders are imported from the host system — such as an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning software) or a WMS (Warehouse Management System) — to the device and then processed. After processing and sequencing, the instructions for what item the operator should pick and where to find it are either spoken out loud (with a text-to-speech system) or shown on the screen.

When the operator is in the correct location, they confirm that they are picking the correct items by checking in to the location. After that, they confirm the products by speaking the product code or another identifier printed on the product. The operator also confirms the quantity they are about to pick. In case of incorrect or inaccurate confirmation, the voice application can correct the operator multi-modally.

Depending on the implementation, location information, RFID and other technologies can be used to optimize the route and maximize the efficiency of the operator.

Typical voice commands that operators use include product code strings, quantities, and locations. The operator can also slow down or hasten the voice user interface. A [well-designed multimodal voice user interface](https://www.speechly.com/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) is the key to highest efficiency.

## Benefits of voice picking

Benefits of using [voice in a warehouse setting](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/logistics-and-warehouse-professionals/) include, but is not limited to:

- **Faster and more efficient picking**
  Faster and more efficient picking: Picking is the most expensive and labor-intensive warehouse process. It can constitute more than half the cost of a typical distribution center. Voice-user interfaces increase hourly pick rate.
- **More accurate reporting and better data quality**
  Anomalies — such as broken or missing items — can be reported in real time, resulting in better data quality and cost savings.
- **Safer warehouse environments**
  Safety is a priority in an efficient logistics facility. Hands-free and distraction-free operation of voice-user interfaces reduces injuries and accidents.
- **No need for printing and distributing picking documents in paper**
  Because orders are imported directly from the ERP or WMS to the employees' mobile devices, operators are ready to start picking right after they start their shift.
- **Decreased training time for new employees**
  Unlike traditional barcode and RFID scanners and hard-to-use enterprise software, voice-user interfaces are intuitive and require less than a day of training time for new employees. This can be a great benefit in warehouses with many seasonal employees.
- **Improved efficiency due to operators being able to do two things at once**
  Voice-directed warehouses enable operators to spend up to 95% of their work time picking, rather than reporting and searching for documents.
- **Improved customer satisfaction due to no incorrect shipping**
  Incorrect shipping is costly and reduces customer satisfaction. With voice picking, mistakes are massively reduced.
- **Effectiveness in cold environment**
  Traditional user interfaces are hard to use in cold storages and environments that require operators to wear gloves.
- **Happier employees**
  Simplified operations lead to happy, productive employees and decreased employee turnover.

Unlike some older voice systems currently employed in warehouses, [voice user interfaces](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/logistics-and-warehouse-professionals/) built with Speechly require no per user training of the speech recognition models. The model is trained once, and it will work for all old and new employees.

All interactions between the system and the operator can be tracked — this enables management to track progress in real time and audit trail to resolve anomalies.

Voice picking can be easily integrated into any WMS and ERP with productivity increases of up to 40%. Because of easy implementation and major productivity increases, typical voice projects in warehouses have a relatively short ROI of about 6 to 12 months. Due to improved data quality, it enables warehouse management to track and analyze progress and reallocate resources in almost real time.

The technology doesn’t have to be limited to just picking, though — voice can be used in most other warehouse processes, such as cross-picking, quality control, packing, sortation, replenishment, receiving, and put-away.

## How to get started with Speechly in warehouses

Speechly’s Spoken Language Understanding technology offers industry-leading accuracy without the need for special hardware. Our technology works for all accents and can be adapted to all processes. Typically, a POC can be built that integrates to current ERP or WMS and supports most common warehouse processes in less than a month.

Our pricing is competitive and is based on the amount of audio data sent to our API. Typical costs for using our API in a warehouse setting are some thousands of euros per month. Speechly works on all mobile devices and can be used in custom hardware, too.

If you’re interested in learning more about how voice technology can help your logistics workforce be more efficient and improve your business data quality, [leave your email address](https://www.speechly.com/contact) and our industry specialist will contact you with more details.


Learn how voice picking and voice-directed warehousing with real-time Spoken Language Understanding improves efficiency and key metrics in your warehouse

Voice Picking with Modern Technologies


Voice search or voice-enabled search is the means of searching by using the most natural input channel, human speech. Voice search can refer to Google searches performed by using voice, but in this article, we'll investigate how voice search could be used in touch screen applications and websites.

Here's an example of voice search, just to get it out there as quickly as possible. You can try it out [here](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/)

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

Speechly can be used to create real-time voice user interfaces that give visual feedback to the end-user as they speak. This visual feedback enables user to recover from errors (saying something like "Show me blue, sorry I mean red t-shirts") and it encourages them to go on with the voice experience as they see their commands are being correctly understood.

In case you are interested in only seeing the demo, click [here](https://demos.speechly.com/fashion/) and try out our voice search demo. Then you can get back to the article. There's also a video demo in the bottom of this article.

[20% of all Google App searches](https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/voice-search-statistics/) are done by using voice and a nearly 40% of US internet users are using voice search features. Most of these searches are currently performed on smart speakers and voice assistants.

This is why, for many, voice search only or primarily refers to search engine optimization for voice queries. This is a valid use case for voice, but not the only one. Voice could (and should) also be available on all websites and applications.

According to PwC research from 2018, consumers actually prefer voice over typing for searching. And this is no wonder: typing on a smart phone is not the nicest of tasks and more and more people are using internet primarily on a mobile device.

## Voice search is not available on most applications

When it comes to applications and websites, voice search is still rarely available. Why is that?

We did some small research on developer communities and found out that the **number one reason for not adopting voice search** is the lack of developer tools for doing that.

The lack of developer tools has led to most of the voice commerce still happening on smart speakers and voice assistants. In fact, 20% of consumers in the US who own a smart speaker have already purhcased something by using it. Amazon website, by far the largest US eCommerce platform doesn't support voice currently at all.

But using voice only on a smart speaker is like purchasing something over phone. While totally feasible, it's not the best way of purchasing clothes, for example, as you can't see what you are purchasing. Voice is a good modality for inputting information, but it lacks as a output channel.

By integrating voice to current websites and applications, eCommerce companies could tap into the growing voice market but still have full ownership to their own data and own the customer experience.

## Importance of search

Search is a very valuable part of many applications and designers and developer teams use a lot of time to make it just right for the users. Users who search can be over three times more probable to convert than those who don't search. And search is not only limited to eCommerce, of course. Most applications have some kind of a search functionality.

> Developer tools for building voice search haven't previously been available

This means getting users to search and most importantly to find what they are looking for is of immense value to most product teams. Even if your application offers something that the customer needs, if they don't find it, you are losing business.

Smart speakers can help here, too: according to ComScore, half of online shoppers are using voice assistants to help them research products.

But like we've written many times, smart speakers and voice assistants are not the [holy grail of voice](/blog/why-smart-speakers-are-not-the-future-of-voice/). Actually far from it. Voice needs to be a part of applications to be really relevant.

By adding voice search to your application, you get both of the best worlds; you can tap into the growing voice search market and improve customer experience but your users can still see the product photos you've spent so much time optimizing for and other important information.

## Differences of voice search and traditional search

It's important to note that voice search is not just regular search box that has a microphone button and a speech-to-text system. This approach would lead into a bad user experience and this is not how Google is doing it, either.

In fact, the reason why a lot of searches on Google are done by using voice is that they have developed their natural language understanding capabilities. If you are looking for population of the USA, you can just ask "What's the population of United States" and you'll get your answer.

We search differently by using voice and by typing. For example, voice searches are typically longer than their written counterparts and they are expressed in natural language.

This has clear implications for voice search. While typing "Intel LGA1151 motherboards" to a search bar is a natural way for doing search by typing, uttering that out loud might prove difficult. Probably saying something like "motherboards for new intel processors" might be a better way of expressing the same search by using voice.

While regular search can give valuable information on how the voice search should be implemented, it needs to be designed separately.

## Benefits of voice search

Compared to the traditional search options, search filters and text queries, voice has a few key benefits.

### Synonyms

One major UI problem with graphical user interfaces is that there needs to be a button for each functionality. If you want your users to filter by categories, you'll need to have each of the categories somehow visible in the user interface. Because of this, you have to decide the most important categories and most importantly, names for those.

For instance, if you are selling clothes, you need to decide whether your users find sneakers from category "shoes", "running shoes", "footwear" or "sneakers". Of course you can do subcategories, too, but that still leads into a lot of clicking and searching through many options.

Search doesn't have this drawback. You can define any nunber of synonyms for your categories and product names. Your users can access all these categories from all screens of your applications without diving deep in menus.

### Speed

Voice is also a lot faster than typing. According to [Stanford research](https://hci.stanford.edu/research/speech/), users can speak up to 3 times faster than they can type on a mobile phone.

### Voice makes people buy more

Because it's easier and faster, voice can make users buy more. Based on our experience with [SOK](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/), filling a typical grocery shopping cart can be up to three times faster and hence cart sizes are typically larger than carts created in traditional style.

One of the most important reasons for **not** shopping by using voice is privacy. Consumers are more and more conscious about privacy and they don't necessarily even want a device listening them at home.

By adding voice to your application and leveraging push-to-talk rather than wake words that can be triggered accidentally, you can limit the privacy implications.

If the user is always fully aware when and if they are being listened to, privacy is not such an issue.

## How to do voice search right

To get voice search right, it needs to support natural language. The experience must be natural and it should be as tightly integrated to the current user experience as possible. You don't want to add a voice assistant or a chatbot with a totally different user experience, but to complement your current search.

Speechly is the first developer tool that enables developers to add natural, real-time voice experience to their applications in a short amount of time.

Voice search done by using Speechly works on all platforms with a single configuration for consistent user experience, enables corrections by using speech and is easily integrated to the current user interface with minimal changes.

Here's a demo showing voice search done right. It supports natural language, long or short queries and updates in real-time to encourage user to go on with the voice experience or to enable them to correct themselves quickly.

## Voice search demo

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

Speechly supports [iOS](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/ios/), [Android](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/android/), [React](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/react/) and [React Native](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/react-native/) platforms. You can find tutorials for each platform in our documentation.

If you are interested in adding voice search to your website or mobile application, [contact us](/contact) to learn more!


Searching by voice is already big on Google. Why voice search is still pretty nonexistant on other websites and applications?

Voice Search in Mobile Applications and Websites


For the first time since 2019, the Speechly team was able to attend an in-person [Voice Summit](https://www.voicesummit.ai/) on December 7th and 8th at the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel in Arlington, Virginia. Over 400 people attended in-person, with even more tuning in virtually to talk about voice technology and the broader voice industry.

Speechly CEO Otto Söderlund flew in from Helsinki to do a live demo

[![Image](/blog/tweet1.png)](https://twitter.com/OttoSoderlund/status/1468238216688017415?s=20&t=48o-gpPK0M3ifbfZad1Lpg)

and present a Keynote that included a [surprise announcement](https://www.speechly.comhttps://www.speechly.com/press/press-releases/speechly-releases-alexa-conversion-feature/)

[![Image](/blog/tweet2.png)](https://twitter.com/SpeechlyAPI/status/1468611489363902471?s=20&t=afrqKzgerLtED9YGjL8RaA)

From the simple things like being able to enjoy our morning coffee together

[![Image](/blog/tweet3.png)](https://twitter.com/SpeechlyAPI/status/1468587452101189638?s=20&t=dSUidPVn1W3Sp0y0-m81NQ)

to spending quality time connecting with people

[![Image](/blog/tweet4.png)](https://twitter.com/OttoSoderlund/status/1468402326813786113?s=20&t=WsxOgUlZTerj3abvBA17kw)

it was a great venue for deep discussion about some of the themes we’re seeing in the voice industry.

## Top themes from Voice21

**There’s been a clear shift from voice as a novelty to voice as a utility.**

This is something that JP from [Vixen Labs](https://vixenlabs.co/) talked about in his presentation: the idea that voice was for “play things.” It kept popping in conversations about how the industry has changed recently. Discussions about voice center around use cases, user experience, and business objectives. Users are looking for more from voice, and companies are looking for new ways to offer value - often in the form of increased efficiency or ease of use. That means that voice is not “just” a vehicle for a back and forth conversation with an assistant or bot. It’s a means to an end.

And to that end, it’s **less about new channels, and more about improving the experience on existing ones**.

Developing and driving usage of new, voice-only, channels can be difficult and expensive - especially if you step outside of the Big Tech assistant ecosystem. Driving usage of new voice features on existing channels requires less effort, and often drives higher usage and reduced churn on those channels. Why? At the end of the day, people are results oriented - when they realize [how much faster they can get things done with their voice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI68NT8D1m8), everything else becomes frustratingly slow by comparison. When the experience is better, people come back to it.

All of that means that the market is maturing, and with that maturation we shift into optimization.

**Developers are looking for foundational technologies that will help them optimize and streamline their tech stacks.**

Building legacy voice experiences has been either tightly tied to Big Tech device centric platforms or a cobbled together mashup of Natural Language Understanding, Speech Recognition, and CSS. These legacy tools have provided a strong foundation from a hands-on learning perspective but they’ve also required long ramp-up times, capital investment and come with trade-offs in performance or user experience. As voice continues to prove itself as a viable feature and user expectations continue to grow, the trade-offs become less viable.

We left the event energized by the conversations and excited about where the voice industry is heading. See you in 2022!


Top voice industry themes in 2021, from voice user experience to voice technology.

Voice Summit Reflections, December 2021


## What is "Field Service" and "Field Service Management"?

[Field Service](https://www.skedulo.com/what-is-field-service-management/) consists of “workers in the field” who perform various types of tasks. These can include things such as installation, repair, or maintenance of hardware. However, as technology continues to evolve we see the field service landscape evolving as well and expanding into other verticals such as education and healthcare. For the purpose of this post I am going to refer to “Field Service” as any service or task that is performed outside of company walls for a customer where a worker is required to physically visit the customer to complete the job.

Field Service Management (FSM) is simply how an organization decides to manage all of the different pieces of completing work in the field. This is no small task and requires organizations to track a lot of data to ensure they are delivering a quality service to their customers. Data that is frequently tracked in FSM can be seen in the list below:

- Job Start, Completion, & Travel Time
- Equipment Used
- Employee Performance
- Customer Feedback & Surveys

## Challenges in Field Service Management

As you can see in the list above there is a lot of communication between field and office workers that needs to take place alongside a lot of data collection. This puts a lot on the plate of workers in the field who must relay this information, but are also required to complete the field service of interest while delighting customers in the process. This leads to a myriad of challenges in FSM. I am going to look closer at the challenges with Data Accuracy and 1st Time Fix Rate as I believe these major challenges can be solved with elegant implementation of [voice technology](/categories/voice-tech/) in existing FSM software.

## Challenge #1 - Data Accuracy

According to a [PwC survey](https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/data-driven-decision-making) of over 1,000 senior executives, highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision making. However, data is only valuable if it is accurate and accessible. In-the-field workforces have been around for decades and as a result many teams have relied on manual methods for gathering and managing data. These processes usually involve legacy tech such as spreadsheets or quite literally writing notes on paper. With this type of process it is easy for data to be innacurate.

As a result of this you have seen companies from startups to big technology companies build FSM software that puts mobile technology at the center of the data management strategy. While these products have improved the data collection for workers in the field, with a lot of credit going to automating steps in the data collection process, there are still [scenarios that require manual input](https://www.speechly.com/blog/ideal-scenarios-multimodal-user-interfaces/) from in-the-field workers. Examples of this could be getting customer feedback or inputing context specific information that relates to the job at hand. It is important that these data points are also tracked with a high level of scrutiny. They can play a significant role in data driven decision making, and given the manual process can lead to inaccuracies in the data.

## Challenge #2 - Fix Rate

The [Fix Rate](https://fsd.servicemax.com/2015/04/13/first-time-fix-rate-field-service-metrics-that-matter/) looks at how successful in-the-field workers are at completing their tasks when they show up to a service call. The goal is to have a high first-time fix rate, where you are able to solve the problem the first time you engage with a customer. According to Aberdeen Group, the “best-in-class” field service organizations achieve an 88% average first-time fix rate, with “average” organizations achieving 80% and “laggards” coming in at 63%. This should be a top priority for field service organizations as improving this metric can result in improvements to the company bottom line.

One of the leading causes for a bad first-time fix rate is lack of education or skills to complete the task at hand. When an in-the-field worker is confused about the task they have to complete, it can result in rebooking the service or spending too much time at a particular jobsite. Either way, lack of skills can be a real challenge when trying to improve a company's first-time fix rate. Organizations should also be looking to better educate their employees, but they should also explore how they can avoid rework on the spot when inevitable problems come up for in-the-field workers.

## Field Service Management Needs Innovation

Customers need to be front of mind when completing field service work, however organizations also need to be mindful of their employees completing the work. One way of doing this is making sure organizations offer tools that enable workers to complete their job as efficiently and effectively as possible. There are a myriad of FSM software options in the market, but despite these tools there is still a lot of innovation that needs to be done to make sure these solutions are actually meeting the needs of in-the-field workers. [Emergence Capital conducted a survey](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-state-of-technology-for-the-deskless-workforce-2020-301192698.html) called “The State of Technology for the Deskless Workforce 2020”. There were two key insights I want to highlight: A) 60% of deskless workers believe there is room for improvement in the technology they use to perform their jobs. B) 75% of deskless workers spend most of their time using a piece of technology that isn’t crafted for their use case.

## 3 Main Benefits of Voice Technology in Field Service Management

Voice technology is a perfect feature to improve existing FSM software. Since voice technology can easily be embedded into existing mobile applications, product teams can create Natural User Interfaces that take advantage of normal mobile features like swipe or type, but also allows for voice input where it makes sense for the end user. You can see the value of having voice input alongside a mobile app in the demo video below:

<YouTube videoId="Gis1qGtclsY" />

There are three main benefits that can be realized with an elegant integration of voice technology in existing FSM software. The first benefit comes from the efficiency of voice as an input vs typing. Smartphone speech recognition is 3x as fast as human typing, however the real efficiency with voice technology comes from eliminating the need for a conversational experience as seen with [popular voice assistants](https://www.speechly.com/blog/real-time-voice-user-interfaces/) like Alexa or Siri. Forcing a conversational experience on the end user eliminates the value that comes from having a mobile screen at our fingertips. The efficiency with voice tech can be unlocked by understanding where there is actual [efficiency with using voice](https://www.speechly.com/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/) as an input vs just tapping something on your screen.

The second benefit with voice technology plays off of the value from efficiency. This benefit is improving the quality of data you are capturing. While many different pieces of data can be tracked automatically, there are still different data points that will need to be updated manually by in-the-field workers. To expand on the insights from the Emergence Deskless Workforce research mentioned above, the leading cause of dissatisfaction stems from inefficiencies with the technology workers use. If workers are not enthusiastic or engaged with the software they use for data collection you are destined to get inaccurate data. There is a big incentive for workers to find technology that actually makes them more efficient and voice technology provides this incentive if implemented properly. This mix of efficiency and engaged users leads to a recipe for accurate data collection.

The third and final benefit focuses on improving the first-time fix rate using voice technology. Organizations with an in-the-field workforce are ultimately going to be performing some type of in person service call, maintenance, check-in, etc. Voice technology enables companies to have an additional modality to access company documentation, instruction manuals, best practices, or any other resource of interest that might help an in-the-field worker complete their task the first time they show up at a service call. Voice technology allows workers to use natural language to both find answers to questions efficiently and also take advantage of the mobile screen for instances where the worker may need step-by-step instruction or visuals to reference.


Voice Technology alongside existing Field Service Management (FSM) mobile solutions can help solve common problems found in FSM

Using Voice Technology in Field Service Management


As voice user interfaces are still quite a new thing, designers can easily go wrong when thinking of building their first voice application. In this blog post, I'll give you three basic principles that can improve the user experience on any [voice user interface](/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/). Last, I'll show you an example of a simple voice application that doesn't suffer from these typical issues.

For more design guidelines and best practices, you can refer to our [Design Guidelines](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/)

## Your users don't want to converse, they want to command

Conversational AI is a hot buzzword, but people most often don't want to conversate with their computers. Most if not all of us have better friends, even though we often spend more time with our computers and mobile phones than any of them.

Most often conversational AI refers to chatbots. Google defines chatbots as "a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet". These can be voice or text-based, but the key is that is bidirectional.

As you can see, it's pretty tedious. Some might call it "conversational", but to me, it's closer to these early user interfaces I referred earlier. The differences with a chatbot and a text-based UI are that instead of commands, you write natural (or almost natural) language, and instead of one command, your order progresses slowly by the UI asking details about the order one at a time. While that might be easier to learn initially, it's a lot slower when you do that for the tenth time.

So point number 1, your **users don't want to converse**. They want to achieve something and they want to do that with minimal effort and time.

## User interfaces should always support multiple modalities

This point is rather obvious, but still often misunderstood especially when it comes to voice. The most common voice user interface that people use in their every-day life are smart speakers and while they are quickly gaining popularity, they are not the best examples of voice user interfaces.

Modalities in user interaction context are defined as single independent channels of sensory input/output between the computer and its user. Examples of modalities include vision (display), touch, voice (both for input and output), etc. Most computer systems support many modalities at once – for example, you are currently reading this by using a display, but you can also select parts of the text by using touch or a mouse.

Voice assistants, on the other hand, only support voice. You can command them by using voice and they answer by using voice. While this works great in some settings, especially in-car where users' hands are not usable and they should be looking at the road, not a display. The problem with this approach is that voice is a pretty slow way of transmitting information.

Let's say you'd like to know the 10 biggest cities in the US and their growth rate. This is it in a visual form.

| Rank | City         | State        | Census 2019 | Change since 2010 |
| ---- | ------------ | ------------ | ----------- | ----------------- |
| 1    | New York     | New York     | 8,336,817   | 0.0198            |
| 2    | Los Angeles  | California   | 3,979,576   | 0.0493            |
| 3    | Chicago      | Illinois     | 2,693,976   | −0.06%            |
| 4    | Houston      | Texas        | 2,320,268   | 0.1048            |
| 5    | Phoenix      | Arizona      | 1,680,992   | 0.1628            |
| 6    | Philadelphia | Pennsylvania | 1,584,064   | 0.038             |
| 7    | San Antonio  | Texas        | 1,547,253   | 0.1656            |
| 8    | San Diego    | California   | 1,423,851   | 0.0891            |
| 9    | Dallas       | Texas        | 1,343,573   | 0.1217            |
| 10   | San Jose     | California   | 1,021,795   | 0.0802            |

But now think of how you would say this so that the person listening would also comprehend it? Not very simple and it would easily take a minute or two to even say out loud.

Other common use case where multiple modalities work great is choosing from several options. If you would want to see details about one of these cities, you could say something like "Show more information about number 4 (or Houston)", but even easier would be to just click on Houston and see more information.

There are tasks where voice works great and there are tasks where something else works great. Don't force your users to listen to long speeches but use display whenever possible.

So point 2: **always support all relevant user interaction modalities in your app**.

## Complex voice commands are hard for the user

People tend to think that the problem with voice user interfaces has to do with the [ASR](/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/#a) (automatic speech recognition, transcribing speech to text) accuracy or in general with how the technology can perform. Of course, sometimes there are issues with how the system understands the commands, but it's also a human problem. We just are not very good at expressing more complex ideas in exact and concise language.

Let's say you would have a general artificial intelligence voice assistant that would be able to comprehend and do pretty much everything, but it would still not know how to play rock-paper-scissors. It's not very hard to teach this game to a 5-year old, but try coming up a voice command that would do that. Think of something like "Hey Alexa, let's play a game where we both pick one of rock, paper, or scissors. The scissors would beat paper but lose to rock and the paper would beat rock..."

Even though the machine could transcript all words you utter perfectly, it would be very hard to express the rules of the game in concisely in one utterance. This is one reason why smart speakers don't often get your intentions right. It's not that they didn't understand or that they heard wrong but rather you expressed yourself wrong. You thought that the smart speaker would be smart enough to understand that when you say "turn off the lights", you meant "turn off the lights that I want to turn off" or "turn off all the lights in my immediate vicinity but not the garage door light I always keep on or upper floor toilet light that is on because someone is currently using it". It's not.

Voice user interfaces should support this ambiguous and often contradicting way we humans use language. Show the user constantly what's happening and support many ways for expressing the same things. Make sure your application works the same even if the order of commands is different. Keep track of user context in application and refer to that.

In our rock-paper-scissors game, the more natural way of expressing the rules would be in short steps. Something like:

> There are two players who pick one of three options: rock, paper or scissors"
> "OK"
> "The players choose their option on a count of three"
> "A-ha"
> "Rock beats scissors but loses to paper"
> "Got it"
> "Scissors beat paper but lose to rock"
> "Understood"
> "And finally paper beats rock but loses to scissors"
> "Perfect"
> "If both players pick the same option, it's a tie"
> "Sure

Point 3: **don't expect your users to use multi-word commands but rather split these into subtasks**

## Putting it all into practice

We saw earlier an example of ordering a pizza by using a chatbot. It wasn't very quick, but how it should be done?

<YouTube videoId="3ch0f_F6I7Q" />

Here's a quick example to show how a pizza could be ordered by using a multi modal voice user interface. The application listens to orders when the microphone is activated and shows new items appear in cart in real time. If the user wants to modify an order, for example to edit the toppings, they click on an item to modify it.

The application gives enough context for the user but doesn't clutter the view with extra elements. It doesn't require users to chat with the computer, but rather waits for user commands and obeys them as accurately and quickly as possible.

And by the way, building and prototyping voice user interfaces doesn't need to be that hard. With Speechly, you can create your first application and try it out in a few minutes. Check out our video [Quick Start](https://www.speechly.com/docs/quick-start/) and sign up to our [Dashboard](/dashboard/) and start prototyping!


Tips for a Beginner in Voice UI Design


The User Interface experience for the web and mobile has changed very little in the past decade. We are still clicking and typing, tapping and swiping. Users can only do what a designer decides to make available. And, they are forced into a specific sequence of steps to accomplish any task.

Voice User Interfaces (Voice UIs) were supposed to change all of this because they are fast, flexible, and enable complex inputs with nearly zero effort. It has not happened to date because Voice Assistants were thrust upon us as the one and only Voice UI. It is not the right model for many websites and mobile apps. However, there is a better model for Voice UIs.

What is the goal of a UI? Typically, it is to help the user fulfill their intent efficiently and consistently. However, it can be hard to put the right information and controls in front of every user to meet their exact need at a given moment with a standard visual interface. However, we now have the technology to move from Designer-Constrained experiences to User-Driven experiences by leveraging Voice UIs as a Feature of our experiences. Download this white paper to learn more!

## What You Will Learn

- How Voice User Interface (UI) Features Outperform Voice Assistants
- Limits of the Voice Assistant Model
- Evolution of UIs
- How Voice Helps Create The Fastest UI for the Web & Mobile
- The Inevitability of Voice UI Features

<WhitePaperBanner
  title="Voice&nbsp;UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice&nbsp;UIs"
  description="Learn how Voice UI features are outperforming Voice Assistants."
  filePath="/files/speechly-whitepaper-voice-uis-vs-conversational-voice-uis.pdf"
/>


Checkout our most recent White paper exploring the benefits of Voice UIs as a Feature in Mobile & Web experiences vs traditional Conversational Voice UIs found with Voice Assistants.

Voice UIs as a Feature vs Conversational Voice UIs


[Voice user interfaces](/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/) (VUI) are complex systems that require in-depth design, prototyping and iteration.

There are various kinds of tools aimed to [support designers](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) and [developers](/develop/) in building new voice-enabled products. This article aims to outline the best free tools available to help you to design, prototype and develop voice user interfaces.

## Design tools

### Notepad

![Notepad is a great start for prototyping voice user interfaces](image4.jpg)

Simple text editors are a good starting point in any design process. Any either online or offline editors will work just fine, as long as it helps you to get thoughts together. Such tools include everything from textbook to Google Docs.

### Mind mapping

![Mind mapping voice user interfaces](image3.png)

Mind mapping tools are perfect when creating flowcharts, which helps to structure the information and build a conversation flow. One of the examples of such tools is diagrams.net, which is an open source, online, desktop and container deployable diagramming software that also comes for free.

### [Adobe XD](https://www.adobe.com/products/xd.html)

![Adobe XD has simple voice functionalities](image1.png)

Adobe XD is a comprehensive vector-based user experience design tool for web apps and mobile apps which can help you create an interactive VUI design. Adobe XD is an interface design first of all, but it also includes an option for voice prototyping. Adobe XD offers a free plan as a starting tier.

### Spreadsheets

![Spreadsheet can be used for prototyping](image6.png)

Any kind of spreadsheet tools can be of great help when designing all types of VUI. Spreadsheets can assist when planning possible user utterances variations, crafting possible intents and contexts of interactions. An example of a trending spreadsheet tool is Airtable, which is available for free, but you can also go with a good old Excel or Google Spreadsheets.

## Development tools

### [Voiceflow](https://www.voiceflow.com/)

![VoiceFlow is built by Google](image11.png)

Voiceflow is a collaboration tool to design, prototype and build for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Starter tier is free and lets you create up to 2 projects and allows 1000 interactions per month, but for personal use only.

### [Dialogflow](https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow)

![DialogFlow is a CUI platform by Google](image5.png)

Dialogflow is a Google-owned platform that is used to design a conversational user interface into mobile apps, web applications, devices and bots. Google Dialogflow offers a Trial Edition with limited features and volumes.

### [Speechly](https://www.speechly.com/)

![Speechly can be used for prototyping and for building complex voice user interfaces](image7.png)

Speechly is a spoken language understanding solution specifically designed to build voice user interfaces. You can use Speechly Dashboard for quickly prototyping your configuration and then integrate your configuration to your app for a full voice experience.

We can even help you build your configuration! Just [contact us](/contact) and we can build your configuration for you – for free!

## Prototyping tools

### [Botsociety](https://botsociety.io/)

![Botsociety is a prototyping tool for conversational interfaces](image2.png)

Botsociety allows designers and marketers to preview and prototype conversational interfaces for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Google Home and more. Botsociety is available for free with certain limitations.

### [Landbot](https://landbot.io/)

![Landbot is a no-code solution for VUIs](image9.png)

Landbot is a user-friendly no-code solution for creation of conversational apps. You can try out Landbot for free with their Sandbox plan.

### [Botmock](https://botmock.com/)

![Botmock is a simple drag-and-drop prototyping tool](image10.png)

Botmock lets you create conversation flows and interactive prototypes from a simple drag and drop editor, then share or test those prototypes and get feedback in one centralized location. Botmock offers a 15-day trial for a standard plan.

### [Fabble](https://fabble.io/)

![Fabble can be used for Alexa and Google Assistant skills prototyping](image8.png)

Fabble allows you to design and prototype Alexa Skills, Google Assistant Actions, chatbots, IVRs and other VUI/CUI together, no coding needed. The service is available for free and limited to the project's sizes.

## Help us build a list

We would like to keep this list live and update it as new tools for prototyping VUI appear. Let us know if we are missing any great tools by [sending us an email](mailto:hello@speechly.com)


Tools for prototyping voice user interfaces are not easy to find. We've collected the best tools in one list.

Tools for Prototyping Voice User Interfaces


### In this post

In this post, we'll go through some use cases and examples for natural voice user interfaces in various domains and user tasks.

Not many apps or websites already employ a voice user interface because of a lack of developer tools for building them. These examples use Speechly Spoken Language Understanding technology for a natural voice UI, enhancing the touch screen user experience with voice functionalities.

- Form filling with voice
- Voice in eCommerce and search filtering with voice
- Adding items from a big inventory, such as grocery eCommerce
- Professional applications
- Information heavy data input
- Voice in VR/AR and gaming
- Web applications with voice user interfaces
- Speechly’s speech recognition accuracy

Speechly offers a unique tool for building [real-time multimodal voice user interface](/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/). Our technology can be applied to any industry or domain to enhance current touch user interfaces with voice functionalities.

Speechly offers a Spoken Language Understanding API that returns user intents and entities in real time for user voice input. This approach enables end users to see the result of their voice commands visually as they speak instead of the traditional smart speaker paradigm that is based on turn-based queries.

Real-time visual feedback is the key to efficient and intuitive user interfaces, because it allows users to multitask. Instead of saying something and waiting for the answer, end users can speak in a stream of consciousness fashion, correcting themselves if needed. On the other hand, the visual feedback encourages users to go on with the voice experience.

We have collected some examples of user tasks that can be solved more effectively with our voice technology. In short, voice user interface works great if:

- Your users know what they want to achieve
- Data quality is important
- User tasks are repetitive

Let's see our examples.

### Form filling by voice

Voice is a great solution for information heavy, repetitive tasks such as [form filling](/blog/turn-any-web-form-into-a-voice-form/). Filling forms on a mobile device can be cumbersome because of difficult typing and common usability issues on different screen sizes and mobile browsers.

In our demo, we enhanced an existing HTML form with voice functionalities. The form can be manipulated by using touch or voice simulatenously. End user can use natural language to fill the form and gets instantenous feedback on the form.

By seeing the form, the user knows exactly what kind of questions they need to answer and they can the form in any order and by using any interaction modality.

<YouTube videoId="XWqHV1a32LM" />

### eCommerce search filtering

[Search](/blog/voice-search/) is one of the most important parts of a eCommerce customer experience. Up to 30% of eCommerce visitors will use search for navigating and a user who doesn't find what they are looking for is a lost customer.

A major share of Google searches are already done by using voice, but very few eCommerce sites offer a similar experience.

Speechly makes it simple to add voice functionalities to eCommerce stores. Again, the user can use natural language to search for products and unlike with traditional categories, voice categories naturally supports synonyms. No matter if the user asks for pants or trousers, they find what they are looking.

It's also important that the user interface updates in real time. This enables user to correct themselves in case of an error and encourages them to go on with the voice experience.

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

### Grocery shopping

[Grocery shopping](/blog/grocery-ecommerce-user-experience/) is a special kind of shopping experience, because the user wants to add a lot of familiar products from a large inventory to their shopping cart as easily as possible.

Traditional user experience requires a lot of repeated searches and selections, but voice enables the user to just say out loud the products they want and see them added to their cart. If they need to change a certain product, for example by changing a milk to another brand of milks, they can do it easily by just clicking the product.

<YouTube videoId="yzdSVV4xjb0" />

### Professional applications

Professional applications are a great use case for voice functionalities, because the language used in these settings is accurate and commonly shared by everyone.

Speechly can be used to create efficient user experience for [professional applications](/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/) in many industries and domains. In this example, airline maintenance workers can easily report anomalies and defects in airplane cabin.

You can also read about our offering for [warehouse professionals and logistics](/blog/voice-picking/).

<YouTube videoId="kIjR-TWatFI" />

### Voice in VR/AR

Virtual reality environments can offer a very immersive experience that can showcase for instance real estate locations easily and accurately, even amidst pandemic situations.

However, the first time user experience in these environments suffer from clunky hand controllers that are unintuitive and hard to use. Learning these controllers take time from the actual experience.

Voice, on the other hand, is a very intuitive and natural way to interact in a virtual reality environment. Speechly created a virtual reality environment with our partner ZOAN that improves the first time user experience significantly.

<YouTube videoId="QIsld57q1cw" />

### Information heavy data input

Speechly can be used to [improve form filling](/blog/turn-any-web-form-into-a-voice-form/) when efficiency and data quality is important.

The following demo showcases a CRM use task in which a sales professional can input sales data by using voice. This leads into better data quality and improved data collection.

CRM is a great example of how voice can improve data input. The quality of the data is very important and data input is done in a repetitive way. Similar examples include health apps such as meal tracking and fitness tracking and other professional applications.

<YouTube videoId="6GcgPcMOuQk" />

### Web applications with voice UIs

Unlike [most other solutions](/blog/web-speech-api-alternative/), Speechly is supported by all modern browsers and can be used to create awesome voice experiences for web.

In our demo application, we created a simple photo editing application that is used solely by using voice. It supports natural language and the user can see the effects being applied to the image in near real time.

<YouTube videoId="EvKWlOlwLHY" />

### Speech recognition accuracy

Speechly is not optimized for pure speech recognition. Our models are configured for a certain use case and we use this configuration to bias the speech recognition model. This helps improve the accuracy.

However, our speech recognition accuracy is still on par with general purpose speech recognition software such as Google Cloud Speech.

In this demo video, Speechly and Google [Webspeech API](/blog/web-speech-api-alternative/) are transcribing the Jobs keynote from the first iPhone release event.

<YouTube videoId="1hcdCrFl-MQ" />

You can try out our general accuracy [here](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/#/playground/ead4b9e7-e5c4-48ed-9dae-3c530916ed76?language=en-US). Do note that the ASR accuracy improves significantly when the models are configured for your use case.

## Conclusions

Voice GUIs can be used to improve user experience in wide variety of applications and domains. If you want to hear how your application's user experience can be improved with modern voice technologies, submit your email and we'll contact you as soon as possible.

If you are still not convinced, here's what our customers think of working with us. You can also read more about the [advantages of voice user interfaces](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/).

<YouTube videoId="etvskJy3hqw" />


Reactive voice user user interfaces enable intuitive and efficient experiences that improve key metrics

Examples of Natural Voice User Interfaces


Speechly is a tool for enhancing touch user interfaces with a [voice modality](/blog/what-is-voice-user-interfaces/). In addition to touching and clicking, the end user can use the most natural way for interacting with the application – voice.

This blog post is about why you should use [Speechly React client](/blog/react-client-published/) for building your next multi modal user experience. If you already knew it, you can jump directly to our [Get started with React Client](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/react-client/) tutorial and start developing.

## **Index:**

- [What is Speechly?](/blog/voice-user-interfaces-for-react/#index)
- [Problems with current touch user interfaces](/blog/voice-user-interfaces-for-react/#problems-with-current-touch-screen-experience)
- [Problems with current voice user interfaces](/blog/voice-user-interfaces-for-react/#problems-with-current-voice-user-interfaces)
- [Speechly React client](/blog/voice-user-interfaces-for-react/#speechly-react-client)
- [Start developing](/blog/voice-user-interfaces-for-react/#start-developing)

So far developers and designers have been limited in the services they can use for voice user interfaces and only simple question-answer based interactions have been feasible. On the other hand, while touch screens are great, there are a lot of use cases that could be improved. Something as common as filling a form or changing search filters requires quite a lot of tapping and swiping.

We don't believe in [smart speakers and voice assistants](/blog/why-smart-speakers-are-not-the-future-of-voice/) and have worked hard to improve both the current touch screen experience and the current voice experience with our technology.

## Problems with current touch screen experience

React is a great library for building user interfaces and it makes building UI components fast and easy. However, while scrolling and tapping is fun and even addictive, there are tasks that could be completed a lot easier by voice. Some common use tasks that could use a better UX include:

### **Form filling**

A typical form has a few text input fields, possibly with autocomplete, one or two dropdowns, maybe a multiselect and a few radio buttons and a date picker. To fill them all, the user needs to tap to select the input field, type something, select something and move to the next field. And because there are multiple ways how each of these fields can be implemented, some amount of confusion is a given.

### **Search filtering**

Search is a typical feature in almost all applications. A good [search can double](https://econsultancy.com/four-reasons-why-site-search-is-vital-for-online-retailers/) the conversion rate on an ecommerce site. But the more filters you add, the more cluttered the UI gets and it's harder for the user to find the filters they are looking for.

### **User can only touch what they can see**

As a touch interface requires the user to **touch** something, the buttons they need to touch have to be on their view. This is a familiar issue for all designers, as they need to think of ways how the user can interact with all the great features they have added to their application. However, there's only so much screen real estate available, so the buttons need to either be very small or there needs to be some kind of a nested menu, where not-so-often used buttons are hidden.

## Problems with current voice user interfaces

Current voice solutions are built for turn-based voice assistant experiences. The end users' speech input is processed after they stop speaking and answer is usually given by speech output. This works well for some use cases, but it can't be used for enhancing current applications. Speechly is built from ground up for [multimodal touch screen experience](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/).

### **Recovery from problems is cumbersome**

The user says something like "Show me flights from New York to London, departing tomorrow", the machine waits for a while and shows flights from New Jersey to Longmore. With our React client, the user interface updates in real time and it's easy to see whether the system makes any mistakes and fix them either by using voice or by using touch.

### **Ambigous endpointing and failing wake word detection leads to extra latency**

If you have ever used a voice assistant, you'll know that a lot of the queries start by "Hey provider, turn on... Hey provider, turn on the... HEY PROVIDER, TURN ON THE LIGHTS". And once you stop speaking, it takes a random time for the lights to really turn off. With Speechly, the feedback is instantenous and it's always clear when the service is listening.

### **Voice is a slow output channel**

While most of us speak faster than we can write (especially on touch screen device), we read faster than listen. And if you don't hear a small detail in the middle of the sentence, it's hard to go back. For most tasks, it's better to **see** the result rather than hear it. That's why Speechly has been built to be multi modal from the ground up, meaning it supports all modalities: touch, vision and voice simultaneously.

## Speechly React client

We've released a React client that helps developers and designers solve these issues when building React apps. You can find the source code [on GitHub](https://github.com/speechly/react-client) and the package [on NPM](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@speechly/react-client). We've also published [a short tutorial](https://www.speechly.com/docs/client-libraries/react-client/) to get your started with it, so go ahead and check it out!

When building the client, we've tried to make it easy to use with modern React concepts like Context and Hooks, which should make it easy to integrate to your React app. But if you're not interested in using functional components and Hooks, it wouldn't be more difficult - you can still use regular Context consumer approach!

## Start developing

Developing on Speechly requires you to first create your voice UI configuration by using our [web Dashboard](https://api.speechly.com/dashboard/) or our [command line tool](/blog/configure-voice-ui-command-line/). The configuration is done by providing example utterances that your end users are using to interact with the application. After you have configured the application, you can try it out in our Playground and finally integrate it with your application.

Once you have verified that you get the correct intents and entities for your utterances, include the [React client](https://github.com/speechly/react-client) to your application. You can use our React tutorial to get started.


Speechly React Client enables developers to integrate voice functionalities to their React applications

Build Voice User Interfaces with React


The most used tool for voice user interfaces on the browser is the Web Speech API and SpeechRecognition API, but there are major limitations with both technologies.

First, Web Speech API is [only available](https://caniuse.com/speech-recognition) for Chrome. SpeechRecognition API is also available for Firefox and some derivates of these, but the low support makes them unfeasible for production use in any real-life application.

![Support for WebSpeech API is limited](webspeech-api-support.png)

Second, Web Speech API and SpeechRecognition API provides only the transcription of the user's speech. They don't provide any context or meaning (natural language understanding) for this input. While in some use cases that only need the transcription it's not an issue, for more complicated user tasks and for building user interfaces natural language understanding needs to be solved somehow.

Speechly is the first developer tool built from the ground up for building [voice user interfaces](/blog/what-is-voice-user-interface/). Our Spoken Language Understanding API integrates [speech recognition](/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/#s) (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) to a single Spoken Language Understanding API for low latency and improved accuracy.

In addition to wide browser support, Speechly is available for touch screen platforms (Android, iOS and React Native) which makes building cross-platform applications very simple. This makes Speechly the best WebSpeech API alternative for voice user interfaces.

One important aspect when comparing voice APIs is of course the speech recognition accuracy. Speechly benefits from the fact that it's always configured for a certain use case and this configuration is used to bias the speech recognition model.

Biasing helps Speechly correctly catch product names, professional lingo and other harder words. Even without biasing, our speech recognition accuracy is on par with Google's WebSpeech API, as you can see in the video below.

In the video, a standard, non-biased Speechly model is running simultanously with the Google Webspeech API test and both are transcribing Steve Jobs' keynote speech in the first iPhone launch event.

<YouTube videoId="1hcdCrFl-MQ" />

## What is natural language understanding and why do I need that?

Natural language understanding is a branch of machine learning that enables computer systems to extract meaning from text or speech input. It reduces natural language into structured data that typically consists of intents and entities (slots) that modify these intents.

While this might sound complicated, let's give a simple example to clarify it. If the user says something like "Show t-shirts", the user intent is probably something like "show_products" and it has an entity "t-shirt". Naturally, the user might also say something like "Show jeans". In this case, the entity would be the same – "show_products" but the entity would be "jeans".

If we are 100% sure that our users will always use either of these two utterances in exactly this format, we can use a very simple regular expression as our natural language understanding algorithm.

But most often this is not the case. Rather, the user can express this same intent in many different ways. Maybe they say something like "I'd like to see turtlenecks" or "Do you have any tees?"

A good natural language understanding algorithm can extract the meaning out of all these utterances and always return with the same intent and entity, no matter how the user expresses themselves.

WebSpeech and SpeechRecognition APIs don't have any natural language understanding capabilities and if you need that, you'll need to start learning [SpaCy](https://spacy.io/) or some other natural language understanding tool. This increases development time significantly and adds complexity.

## Why Spoken Language Understanding?

Now as we've learned, a voice user interface needs two distinct parts: speech recognition to transform user speech into text and natural language understanding to extract meaning (intents and entities) from that text. WebSpeech and SpeechRecognition APIs only offer speech recognition.

If you have ever used Google Assistant, Alexa, or Siri, you've probably seen that while the text transcript appears in near real-time while the user speaks, when the user stops speaking there is a small delay after which the action happens. This is where the natural language understanding happens and the action that the user wanted is performed.

Speechly is a Spoken Language Understanding API that provides both of these functions in a fully streaming fashion. When the user starts talking, the API begins returning both the transcript and the "meaning", eg. intents and entities for this input. This makes applications built with Speechly very responsive and fast to react to user input.

In fact, Speechly returns both interim and final results for both the transcript and for intents and entities for even faster feedback.

Unlike SpeechRecognition or WebSpeech API, Speechly [browser-client](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/web-client/) is supported by [all modern browsers](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/supported-browsers/) on mobile and desktop. You can also use Speechly for iOS and Android and we are adding more client libraries in the future, too. You can find all our client libraries [here](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/) for up-to-date status.

The streaming fashion of Speechly enables natural end-user utterances such as "Show me t-shirts... sorry I mean jeans". For most other voice UI APIs, this kind of query fails because of end pointing (or failure in natural language understanding): the system recognizes the small pause in between as a signal for the end and starts processing the first part of the utterance without taking into account the last part.

Another important thing that streaming enables is real-time visual feedback. If we think about our example utterance "Show t-shirts" it can show the t-shirts as soon as the user has stopped speaking. This encourages the user to go on and they can continue with something like "for men... in size large".

Configuring the natural language understanding model on Speechly is very simple and can be done either in our web dashboard or by using our command line tools. The former works great for simple projects and initial models and the latter is better for projects with several developers collaborating on the same model.

## Spoken Language Understanding demo

Here's a quick demo showing this a web application built with Speechly Spoken Language Understanding in action:

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

As you can see from the demo, real-time visual feedback is the key to natural voice user interfaces. We believe that the lack of real-time feedback is the reason, why [the "iPhone moment" has not happened yet](/blog/real-time-voice-user-interfaces) for voice UIs. This kind of real-time feedback can't be done with either WebSpeech or SpeechRecognition API.

You can see the differences between responsiveness also by checking out [this GitHub project](https://jnguyen9763.github.io/chesswithspeech/) that is using WebSpeech API for a chess game. Then compare it to this video which shows a similar (albeit more simple!) chess game built with our JavaScript client.

<YouTube videoId="yKXuqR6swBE" />

Just like the iPhone succeeded with the touch screen because of its very responsive and intuitive user experience, voice UIs need the same responsiveness and intuitiveness to really succeed.

## Alternatives for WebSpeech API

### Amazon Transcribe

[Amazon Transcribe](https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/) is Amazon's text-to-speech API that suffers from the same limitations than WebSpeech API and SpeechRecognition API.

While it does offer accurate speech recognition, it does not have natural language understanding capabilities, which makes it slow and non-responsive for voice user interfaces.

#### IBM Watson Speech to Text

[IBM Watson Speech to Text](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-text-to-speech) is another paid for speech-to-text API that does not include NLU capabilities.

### Microsoft Bing Speech API

[Microsoft Bing Speech API](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/speech-services/) is Microsoft's answer to speech recognition, but unfortunately does not support natural language understanding either.

### Assembly AI

[Assembly AI](https://www.assemblyai.com/) offers great features for speech to text, including profanity filters and multiple models for different accents. It's a bit cheaper than the other altenatives, but does not support NLU, either.

### Speechly

[Speechly](https://www.speechly.com/) offers fully streaming real-time Spoken Language Understanding API for integrating responsive voice user interfaces for any web application.

## Conclusions

Building voice user interfaces for browser applications can't be done without natural language understanding capabilities. While it is possible to use another tool for speech recognition and another for NLU, it adds complexity and most probably increase latency so that real-time visual feedback is not achievable.

This makes Speechly the only available tool that enables complex voice user interfaces in browser with a single API and with wide support for different browsers.

If you are interested in building real-time voice user interfaces for React or JavaScript, you can start using Speechly by completing our tutorials. You can follow either the [React tutorial](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/react/tutorial/) or [JavaScript tutorial](https://docs.speechly.com/client-libraries/web-client/tutorial/) depending on the platform you are developing on.

If you want to learn more about what kind of applications Speechly enables, you can refer to our [Use cases](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/) section.


Speechly provides an alternative for Web Speech API React that works in all modern browsers and is optimized for real-time voice user interfaaces

Web Speech API Alternatives for Voice User Interfaces


What is Speechly? That's one of the keywords people use to find our website and no wonder why. It's not very easy to define something like us, but let's try.

## Speechly as a company

First of all, Speechly is a Helsinki, Finland-based startup that as of writing this post has about a dozen skillful employees and co-founders and a [brand new office](https://twitter.com/SpeechlyAPI/status/1167444750473076736) in central Helsinki. Speechly was founded in 2017 by skillful machine learning specialists. They had been building voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa for major tech companies and realized that the technology could be developed into something a lot better than current smart speakers.

As a company, we believe in small super professional teams who are fully capable of organizing their work independently. We believe that a small team of motivated and smart people working on solving a big problem can achieve miracles and challenge the incumbents.

We believe that modern professionals know how to best plan their work in terms of where to work, what tools to use etc. We also believe that our open and fair culture allows people to develop themselves and progress their career fueled by our fast growth, challenging work assignments and super-smart co-workers. We believe that everyone should laugh every day at work as work should always be fun and motivating.

Working at Speechly is fun, rewarding and challenging. We are constantly looking for skillful speech scientists, senior software developers, and another workforce. See our [careers-page for job openings](https://www.speechly.com/careers/).

## Speechly as a technology

Speechly is also a technology. Speechly is the tool our founders started to build in 2017. It's a set of tools and APIs that enable developers to [build voice-enabled user interfaces](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) to their apps and services on any platform. It can be used in [eCommerce]/(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUAwpSDDd_Q), gaming, digital health, VR, point-of-sale terminals and more. We have ready SDKs for iOS, Android, Unreal Engine and web. We call our tool a _spoken language understanding_ tool.

With our technology, developers can add voice functionalities to any app. You want to use voice in [adding products to the shopping cart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzdSVV4xjb0)? Speechly’s got it. You want to use voice to control cameras or change strategies in a sports game? Speechly’s got it. You want to create a check-in self-service desk where customers can use to voice to register in? Speechly’s got it. You need [voice search](/blog/voice-search/)? We've got it. And it can be used to power a lot more complex voice tasks.

One of the most unique ideas in our technology is that it combines speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies. Most other providers do these tasks separately. This allows our tool to be faster (almost real-time!) and more accurate than other providers. What does it mean?

When the user starts talking, most other providers start listening to the audio stream and translate the stream into speech. Many of them do this pretty well and after the user stops talking, they give out a text string that represents the sentence the user just said. This is called speech recognition.

After we have the sentence we need to make sense of it. This step is called [natural language understanding (NLU)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-language_understanding). Let's say we have two sentences "turn off the lamp" and "shut the lights". Even though they look different as text and if said out loud sound very different, they **mean** the same.

![Current smart speakers transform audio first to text and from text to intent.](speech-to-intent-old-systems.png)

Traditional providers work like in the picture. They first listen to the audio stream and once that finishes, they send the data to another service that extracts meaning out of it. After we have the meaning, we know what the user wants to do and can fulfill the request.

This sounds simple, but it's not how we humans talk. We don't wait for others to say what they want to say and only after that think what the other was trying to say. We listen and understand simultaneously.

If we hear someone saying "Olive, the other reindeer", we might guess that we misheard and what we were supposed to hear is actually "All of the other reindeers" (at least if we were having a discussion on Christmas carols or [Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen)). Understanding and context make hearing easier. We also give feedback to others about our hearing and understanding as we speak: we nod, say "a-ha" or look confused based on what we have just heard (or rather what we think we heard).

Our technology does something similar. When the user starts talking, Speechly starts evaluating the intent of the user. When Speechly hears "Turn off --" it can already guess that the user intent is about shutting off something, maybe a light or other device somewhere. When the user finishes "-- living room TV", Speechly has all the information it needs and can start proceeding with the actual task of shutting it down.

![Speechly combines the mechanics of speech recognition and natural language understanding for faster and more natural user experience](speech-to-intent-speechly.png)

Another feature of Speechly is **[multi-modality](/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/#m)**. By multi-modality we mean that users should be able to interact with their apps using different modalities in different situations. Say you want to order a pizza. You don't want to hear a long list of pizzas they have on their menu but rather see a list of pizzas and select the one that looks the best. But when it's the time to give your address for delivery, it's easier to say it out loud than to type it on the clumsy mobile phone screen. Multi-modality is the option to choose the best interaction type for each task. Our technology is built for multi-modality from ground up.

Now our technology is getting ready for prime time. We have already done some amazing projects with companies such as with virtual reality company [ZOAN](/blog/zoan-voice-technology-in-vr-solutions/) or a major Nordic grocery retailer [SOK](/blog/sok-uses-speechgrinder-for-voice-commerce/). We have proven that the technology is working and now we are packaging the tool and documentation so that any developer can start using it.

Our public documentation will be launched in late 2019 or early 2020. You can already apply for a developer ID by sending mail to [hello@speechly.com](mailto:hello@speechly.com) or filling the form on our [front page](/). And if you still don't know what Speechly is or what it does, please send us a mail, too.

Ps. If you are coming to Slush, find us from the matchmaking tool and come and say hello!


Speechly is a company, but also a developer tool that can be used to create real-time voice user interfaces to any application on any platform. Speechly is fast, smart and easy to deploy for developers and its models are easy to train and modify to specific use cases.

What is Speechly?


**In this post**

- What are voice user interfaces and how do they differ from other types of user interfaces?
- Different types of voice UIs
- Why voice assistants and smart speakers are not the only or even best use case for voice user interfaces?
- What is multimodal user interface?
- Why real time visual feedback is the key to building great user experiences based on voice UI?
- How Speechly solves the usability issues with current voice user interfaces?

As long as general artificial intelligence doesn't exist (and it [won't happen soon](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4!)), any computer system needs a way of interacting with its users. With the user interface the user gives commands to the computer system and gets information back from the system.

For example, if an application can calculate the sum of two numbers, it will need a way to get these numbers from the user. A typical calculator solves this problem by presenting a user with digits from 0 to 9 either in physical form or as touchable and clickable buttons.

The application needs also a way to show the results of this calculation to the user. A calculator most often has some kind of a digital screen for showing this information.

**A user interface can be judged by three main properties:**

- Ease-of-use; how easy it is to use a certain user interface
- Efficiency for inputting information; how fast information can be input through the user interface
- Efficiency for outputting information; how fast the user can process the information coming back from the system

The main types of interfaces are:

### Command Line Interfaces (CLI)

Command line interfaces process commands to a computer program in the form of lines of text. Examples of CLIs include UNIX systems, DOS and Mac OS Terminal app.

Command line interfaces are typically unintuitive and have a significant learning curve, but once the user masters them they can be a powerful and easy to automate through scripting. They can be used to create very efficient user interfaces, but can be difficult to learn.

![Example of a command line interface](cli-example.png)

### Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)

Graphical user interfaces, sometimes referred to as WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers) are user interfaces that use pointer (most often a mouse or a finger) to interact with elements on the screen.

Nearly all modern user interfaces support some kind of graphical user interfaces. While there's nothing intrinsically intuitive in using a mouse to click buttons, after a user has used some GUIs, learning new ones is often pretty easy. For example, if the user has used Words on Windows, using Google Docs on a Linux should be somewhat easy.

Scripting and automating graphical user interfaces is difficult. Using mouse is not very ergonomic and touching is not very accurate. This is why graphical user interfaces are not always the best option for building efficient user interfaces.

### Menu Driven Interfaces

Menu driven interfaces are kind of graphical user interfaces that consists of a series of screens which the user navigates through by choosing options from a list.

Because menu driven UIs are simple, they are often used in walk-in terminals, such as ATMs. Each screen has one simple question or functionality and means to interact with it. They are intuitive, easy-to-use but inefficient.

### Voice User Interfaces (Voice UI or VUI)

Voice user interfaces are user interfaces that are used through speech. Typical examples of voice user interfaces include smart speakers and voice assistants.

Voice UIs employ speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies to transform user speech into text and meaning. Speechly is a tool for enhancing traditional touch user interfaces into multimodal voice user interfaces, but let's get back to that a bit later.

Voice user interfaces are highly intuitive as they use the most natural way for us to communicate: speech. They are significantly faster than typing to input information but significantly slower than reading or seeing to output information from the computer system back to the user.

<YouTube videoId="xI68NT8D1m8" />

### Other types of user interfaces

User interfaces can be divided into many different classes. Some other types of user interfaces include form-based user interfaces that use text input boxes, dropdown menus and buttons to simulate a paper form.

Text-based natural language user interfaces, such as chatbots can be thought as a subset of voice user interfaces. They are almost like voice UIs, but employ text rather than voice. Quite contrary to voice user interfaces, they can be slow to input information but can be faster to output it.

Some call voice user interfaces and text-based natural language user interfaces Conversational User Interfaces (CUI), but it is important to note that voice user interfaces do not need to be conversational. For example "Turn off lights" can be seen as a voice command that does not need any kind of conversation back from the computer system. The user does not want to conversate, but rather shut down the lights.

## Types of voice user interfaces

While smart speakers have brought voice user interfaces to many living rooms, voice UIs are not a particularly new innovation. The first voice user interfaces were IVR, Interactive Voice Response, systems that enabled users to interact with a phone system by using speech. Typically IVRs recognized only digits, but nonetheless they were early voice user interfaces.

The other type of voice UIs is of course smart speakers and voice assistants that recognize all kinds of natural language. They are general purpose digital aides that mainly use voice as an output method back to the user.

Voice command devices (VCD) are devices such as home appliances that can be controlled by voice. These devices can be controlled with simple voice commands. Typically a VCD only understands a dozen or so commands.

The fourth type of voice UIs are multimodal user interfaces that can employ all means of human-computer interaction; voice, touch, vision and tactile. These user interfaces are not general-purpose, but built for a specific application and used in that context. Voice commands can be used in this kind of applications for all or some user tasks.

| Type                       | Purpose  | Output channel | Input channel | Use case |
| -------------------------- | -------- | -------------- | ------------- | -------- |
| IVR                        | Specific | Voice          | Voice         | Narrow   |
| Smart speakers             | General  | Voice          | Voice         | Wide     |
| Voice command device (VCD) | Specific | Voice, display | Voice         | Narrow   |
| Multimodal voice UIs       | Specific | All            | All           | Wide     |

You can read more about benefits of multimodal voice UIs [in this article](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/).

## What is the best user interface?

![Woman shouting to a PA](woman-speaking.jpg)

User interfaces can be either good or bad. Good user interfaces are the ones that user doesn't think that much. They work intuitively, respond to commands fast and give back results quickly.

[Good UIs](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) are intuitive, concise, simple, and aesthetically pleasing. They give enough feedback to the user, tolerate errors such as misclicks or typos, and use familiar elements so that they are easy to use even for new users.

The bad ones – well, they are hard to use, slow and unintuitive. They are the ones that even if the user has used them a million times, they still don't know how they work and why they work like this.

![Elevator user interface](elevator.jpg)

Different user interfaces have different properties and hence the user interface should be designed for each use case of an application. User interfaces should not be thought as binary selections but rather as modalities that are employed differently.

There's no such thing as the "best" user interface. User interfaces should employ all possible modalities and use different kinds of user interfaces for different user tasks to support different use cases.

By using the three properties of user interfaces laid out in the beginning of this post, let's consider how different user interfaces fare.

### Multi-modality and efficient user interfaces

Multi-modality means that a user interface supports different interaction modalities simultaneously. For instance, a graphical user interface can be scripted through a command line user interface. Or maybe the user uses voice commands to input information but gets them back visually on a screen.

| Type of user interface | Learning curve | Efficiency for input | Efficiency for output | Discoverability |
| ---------------------- | -------------- | -------------------- | --------------------- | --------------- |
| CLI                    | high           | high                 | low                   | low             |
| GUI                    | medium         | medium               | high                  | high            |
| Menu driven UI         | low            | medium               | medium                | high            |
| Voice UI               | low            | high                 | low                   | low             |
|                        |                |                      |                       |                 |

Because a menu driven user interface has a very low learning curve, it is a great option for the initial screens of an application. Very often menu driven user interfaces are indeed used for the initial user onboarding.

Voice user interfaces on the other hand are very fast at inputting information and require minimal focus, so they are great for repetitive tasks and information heavy data input.

Graphical user interfaces are great at displaying information, so they should be employed for that.

> Best user interfaces support multiple interaction modalities: voice, touch, vision simultaneously for intuitive and efficient user experience

[Search filtering](/blog/voice-search/) is one use task where it's very intuitive to use voice commands such as "show me green t-shirts", but it would be horrible if the machine answered back by using voice. Rather the results should of course be visibly shown, just like the user asked.

Because smart speakers only employ voice modality, they are not very efficient user interfaces and don't work well but for simple user tasks. A smart designer chooses the best user interface for each tasks. For instance, if the user task is to select a color from three options, a touch user interface or a menu-drive user interface works great. But if the user task is to add their daily meals to an application or [input information to a CRM](/blog/turn-any-web-form-into-a-voice-form/), there's no better option than voice.

![Illustration of people in front of a touch screen device](voice-uis.png)

## How to leverage voice user interfaces

The first applications of voice UIs were interactive voice response (IVR) systems that came into existence already back in the 80s. These were systems that understood simple commands through a telephone call and were used to improve efficiency in call centers. Last time I encountered one was a customer support call center for home appliances where a synthesized voice asked me to say the name of the manufacturer of the device I needed help with. Once it recognized correctly my utterance "Siemens", it directed me to a correct person.

Current voice user interfaces can be a lot smarter and can understand complex sentences and even combinations of them. For example, Google Assistant is perfectly fine with something like "Turn off the living room light and turn on the kitchen light".

However, as these smart speakers always wait until the end of the user utterance and only then process the information and act accordingly, they will fail if the user hesitates with their speech or says something wrong. For instance, you can try something like "Turn off the kitchen light, turn on the living room TV, turn on the bedroom and terrace lights and turn off the radio in the kitchen."

<YouTube videoId="vD0gleP7Sxc" />

On the other hand, [Speechly processes user input from the beginning and returns with actionable results in a streaming fashion](/blog/what-is-speechly/). This enables arbitrarily long utterances with multiple intents and entities. You can try our home automation demo with as complex utterance as you want and it won't fail and it will give the user real-time visual feedback. This feedback is the key in great user experience. You can try the demo [here](https://home-automation-app-demo.herokuapp.com/)

While user interfaces that use voice are intuitive once you know what they are supposed to do, typical problems with voice user interfaces are to do with exploration. Let's say you find yourself closed in a small room that has a mirror on one side and seemingly similar metal panels on every other wall. That might be a cause for panic – or it's a voice-enabled elevator.

If the user doesn't really know what the system is supposed to do as is the case with almost every new mobile application you install, the best way to learn it is by clicking through menus and dialogs (or by reading the documentation!). While you do it, you may find buttons that you were not expecting to find but that might seem interesting or helpful. Then you try them out and hopefully learn how the system works.

A system that only has a voice user interface (for example smart speakers), on the other hand, doesn't support this kind of usage. You can only try saying things and it might or might not do what you were expecting. You can try saying "can you reserve me a table in a seafood restaurant" for your smart speaker, but the answer is either along the lines of "I don't understand" or in the best case something like "You'll need to login to do that. Please open application XYZ on your mobile phone and set up voice."

![A smart speaker with a voice UI](smart-speaker.jpg)

And even if that worked, it doesn't necessarily mean that the smart speaker can also get you an Uber or flight tickets. You'll have to try each of these individually and learn. If you are building a voice user interface to your application, you should really think about how you support feature discoverability in your application.

The second issue with voice-only user interfaces is slowness. Let's say you want to know what happened in NBA in the last round. Saying out loud results for each of the 15 games will take some time. While voice is the most natural way for us humans to interact, it's nowhere near the fastest way of consuming information. On the other hand, voice is faster than typing when inputting information.

This is why we at Speechly **don't believe the current smart speakers and voice assistants employ voice UIs the right way**. Our approach is what we call multimodal Spoken Language Understanding. The cornerstone of that is the interplay of touch user interface and voice.

We believe voice user interfaces should support [multi-modality](/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary/#m). Multi-modality means that a user interface supports more than one user interaction modality, for example, vision, touch, and voice. Now getting those NBA results will become a lot nicer: say "show me the latest NBA results" give you a screen that shows the results. It's easy to skim them through, a sudden loud sound from distance doesn't break your experience and you don't have to wait until you hear the result for your favorite team.

The other important thing is real-time visual feedback. If the system only processes information in the end of the utterance, the user needs to get their utterance right or the query will fail and the user knows this only after they've stopped speaking and are expecting an answer. Speechly returns results in real time, which enables natural corrections and encourages the user to go on with the voice experience.

While adding a voice user interface can improve the user experience and make the application more efficient, it's not a silver bullet that'll turn a bad application into a good one. Just like any user interface, it needs designing and thinking through. We offer [best practices for creating efficient multi-modal voice user interfaces](/blog/voice-application-design-guide/) and our Developer Support team is ready to help you when designing your application.

## Conclusions

User interface is an important part of any application. It should be created to be as simple and efficient as possible. Most often than not, it's not possible by only leveraging one type of user interfaces. Rather, the application should leverage the best parts of all types of user interfaces. We call this multi-modality.

Multi-modal voice user interfaces are applications that take in voice commands and display information back to the user on a screen. Multi-modal voice UIs don't need a wake word (but can use one, of course!) but can employ a push-to-talk button for improved privacy and low latency.

Multi-modal voice user interfaces don't suffer from discoverability issues, because the screen directs the user and helps them understand what the application can do. An example of this can be seen in the video below.

<YouTube videoId="XWqHV1a32LM" />

The user sees a form asking for typical information for a flight booking use case. After seeing this, the user pretty much knows what the application can do and then they can use natural language to interact with the form. They can fill the form in any order and they can correct themselves naturally as they can see the result on their screen in real time.

Multi-modal real-time voice user interfaces can be leveraged in all apps, but most apps should not be made voice-only as is the case with the current smart speakers. Voice user interfaces can work great in professional applications and consumer applications alike.

Examples of professional applications that can benefit from voice UI include CRMs with a lot of repetitive data input, [voice picking in warehouses](/blog/voice-picking/) and other professional applications where [data quality is important](/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/).

<YouTube videoId="6GcgPcMOuQk" />

You can see some examples of the use cases for voice user interfaces in our [Use cases](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/) -section.

We have successfully solved issues with voice user interfaces with many of our customers. If you are interested in building voice user interfaces, leave your information to the form below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible!

### Read more

- See some examples of [voice user interfaces built with the Speechly way](/blog/voice-user-interfaces-examples/)
- [Advantages of real-time multimodal voice user interfaces](/blog/advantages-of-voice-user-interfaces/)
- [How search experience can be improved with voice functionalities](/blog/voice-search/)
- [Voice UIs in professional setting](/blog/improve-workforce-efficiency-voice-uis/)


Voice user interface (VUI) is the means of interacting and using a computer system such as a mobile application or a website by using voice in addition to or instead of touch, keyboard or a mouse.

What are Voice User Interfaces?

Speech to Text technology can be deployed in various ways, such as in the Cloud, On-Device, or On-Premise (Server or Private Cloud). However, there are various Pros and Cons in how you deploy that can affect the Cost, Speed, and Privacy of the experience you build. In this post, we will cover the differences between Cloud, On-Device, and On-Premise Speech to Text deployment and scenarios where you should consider ditching the Cloud for an On-Device or On-Premise deployment.

## Speech to Text: On-Device vs On-Premise vs Cloud

Whether you are running [Speech to Text](https://www.speechly.com/blog/nlu-voice-speech-recognition-terms-glossary) On-Device, On-Premise, or in the Cloud the core outcome remains the same. Speech to Text enables developers to convert audio to text for various use cases, such as [Transcription](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/transcription) for Video Calls or [Moderation](https://www.speechly.com/use-cases/moderation) for Video Game chats. However, there are many more use cases for Speech to Text.

Speech to Text can be deployed in multiple ways. The most common way that Speech to Text is deployed is in the Cloud. This simply means that audio is converted into text using the help of a cloud provider such as Google or Amazon, where the audio is captured on a users device, sent to the cloud for transcription and instruction from the developer on what to do with the transcription, before being sent back to the users device.

Other ways of deploying Speech to Text include On-Device or On-Premise. This simply means that Transcription is taking place directly on the user's device running the application or within a company's private server stack or private cloud. While the use cases for On-Device or On-Premise Speech to Text are similar in nature, meaning at the core there is still the conversion of audio into text, deploying in this fashion comes with some additional benefits to consider.

*[Contact Us to learn more about securely running Speech to Text On-Device or On-Premise with the same accuracy as in the Cloud](https://www.speechly.com/contact)*

## When to run Speech to Text On-Device or On-Premise

Running Speech to Text On-Device or On-Premise has 3 main benefits: Cost, Speed, & Privacy.

### Cost

Most Speech to Text or Speech Recognition solutions are Cloud based products. However, running Speech to Text in the Cloud requires sending large amounts of audio over the internet to be processed. For use cases where there is a lot of audio to be transcribed, like in a Video Call or Stream, the cost can climb fast making Speech to Text an unviable feature. With the ability to run Speech to Text directly on the user's device or On-Premise, the cost can come down by up to 10x depending on the provider.

### Speed

Another key pitfall with many cloud based Speech Recognition providers is the inability to deliver real time Speech to Text. Even with the current speed of sending information back and forth between the cloud, there is still a noticeable lag in speed for the majority of Speech to Text products that greatly disrupts the end user experience. Running Speech to Text On-Device or On-Premise also is a great way to increase the speed of the transcription since the transcription process is never required to leave the end user or companies product ecosystem. 

### Privacy

The final, but arguably most important reason to run Speech to Text On-Device or On-Premise is Privacy. We live in a world where consumers' attention to privacy is at an all time high. Even the concept of technology listening to complete tasks like transcription can make people uncomfortable.

Running On-Device or On-Premise allows companies to build experiences that leverage Speech to Text while giving users confidence that their valuable Voice Data is remaining private, either by never leaving their device or by remaining secure with the company delivering the experience.

## Speech to Text Accuracy: On-Device vs On-Premise vs Cloud

Speech to Text technology is powered by large Machine Learning models which historically has made it difficult to deliver the same accuracy in On-Device or On-Premise experiences vs in the Cloud. Until recently, running Speech to Text anywhere but in the Cloud meant a significant drop in accuracy performance as this environment usually required running smaller and less sophisticated Speech Recognition models.

However, at Speechly the Speech to Text models used by the On-Device and On-Premise solution are the same as the ones used in our Cloud Based offering. This means you can get 95%+ accuracy with Speech to Text Transcription in the Cloud, On-Device, or On-Premise.

## Building On-Device & On-Premise Speech to Text

There are still use cases for Speech to Text technology where a cloud based deployment makes sense. These scenarios are not limited to, but usually will have the characteristic of Lower Overall Voice Data volume. This simply means that there is a small amount of information to be transcribed at any given time - such as giving simple Voice Search inputs to a website. 

When it comes to high volume scenarios, such as Transcribing a Video Call or Moderating a Voice Chat in an online game, deploying Speech to Text either On-Device or On-Premise can bring you Cost, Speed, and Privacy benefits. It is important to keep these factors in mind when finding a Speech to Text technology partner.

*[Contact Us to learn more about securely running Speech to Text On-Device or On-Premise with the same accuracy as in the Cloud](https://www.speechly.com/contact)*

Photo by [Juairia Islam Shefa](https://unsplash.com/@juairiaa?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/computer-cell-phone?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

When deciding to deploy Speech to Text technology On-Device vs in the Cloud you should consider Cost, Speed, & Privacy.

When to Run Speech to Text On-Device or On-Premise vs in the Cloud


Voice is not "getting big", it's already huge. 20% of searches on mobile are already made by voice and googlehomes and alexas are slowly creeping into almost everyone's living rooms. Already over 50 million Americans own a dedicated smart speaker and a lot more are using a voice assistant built into their mobile phone. In fact, when you think of voice user interfaces you are probably thinking of smart speakers and voice assistants.

Voice assistants can be pretty cool. They can answer basic questions and perform simple tasks such as switching lights on and off or starting a robot vacuum just alright. For the end user, voice assistants often just work. When they don't, however, the experience can be pretty confusing. Thankfully most often the queries do work and we get our answer. And remember, these devices have existed only for about five years!

Instead of or in addition to this blog post, you can also watch this short video by our CEO Otto Söderlund.

<YouTube videoId="ancAv8dbQro" />

## Voice assistants for developers

However, from the perspective of someone who's going to build services on top of these assistants, that's not so simple. While Alexa Skill Store can boast with its [more than 100.000 voice apps](https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/25/the-alexa-skills-store-now-has-more-than-100000-voice-apps/), most of these apps are not in fact used. Skill discovery is hard and users are not accustomed to looking for apps for smart speakers.

When you develop services on top of third party smart speaker platform you are also asking your customers to repeat someone else's brand words everytime before interacting with your app. That means you are putting your services and brand within someone else's ecosystem where your brand gets easily lost among competitors and competing services.

Besides you are giving away your data for someone else to monetize. And the major tech giants who are running the voice assistant show love to monetize others' data. There might be [privacy issues](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/09/alexa-are-you-invading-my-privacy-the-dark-side-of-our-voice-assistants), too.

Other crucial issue related to data is that while you might get some piece of data back from the voice assistant provider you don't get data for unsuccesful queries. Say you have a skill for buying flights. If the assistant hears the user request for flights as "lights", tough luck. How often does that happen for your users? You'll never know.

With voice UIs, these unsuccesful queries are often more important than the succesful ones. If the speaker interpreted the user asking for a flight to London and the machine answered with a flight to London, there's not that much to learn from this interaction. It's the failures the developers should be focusing in, but that's not possible with current solutions.

The APIs are also restrictive. It's possible to [deeplink to your app](https://developers.google.com/assistant) and present custom content in the assistant app but leveraging all interaction modalities (touch, vision, voice) is not possible. Developers can't extend their current apps features with voice, it's only possible to bring some of their features in to a third party ecosystem.

![Speechly used in a mobile application](speechly-product-sok.jpg)

## Custom voice user interfaces

At Speechly, we envision a different kind of future for voice. We think voice should be a feature, not an application. We think developers should be able to add amazing voice features in their existing apps and branded experiences and not rely on third party platforms. We think application developers should be able to keep users within their own ecosystem and keep full control of their own data.

Think of touch. When iPhone started, touch was available in all the apps. It was not that all the other apps had to use keypad and only a few Apple-approved things would work in touch mode. No. When App Store came to be, touch was available for all developers. We want the same for voice.

That's why we are building Speechly. Our tool combines the mechanics of speech recognition and natural language understanding for a natural real-time spoken language undestanding API. Speechly is available for mobile applications, games and web applicatios. It can be used for wide variety of use cases from controling virtual reality environments or games to ecommerce and mobile applications.

![Current smart speakers transform audio first to text and from text to intent.](speech-to-intent-old-systems.png)

![Speechly combines speech recognition and natural language processing for faster operation.](speech-to-intent-speechly.png)

App developers can have full access to user data and can train their models for certain acoustic environments and vocabulary. This ascertains fast, well-working and natural voice user interfaces. These would not be possible with current solutions.

For example in [grocery ecommerce](/blog/grocery-ecommerce-user-experience/) we have already proven that our technology allows retailers to create shopping experiences that are five to ten times faster than current solutions based on online stores or smart speaker solutions.

If you are interested in building something with Speechly, contact us at hello [at] speechly.com or apply for an application ID from our [front page](/)!


While smart speakers can handle simple question-answer -based queries just fine, they are not the future of voice. What is?

Why are Smart Speakers Not the Future of Voice?

### TLDR;

* Voice chat has become a key feature for creating social connections in online games and is expected to be even more important in metaverse environments, some of which will have more significant social features than games do today.
* Voice chat users are known to access games more frequently and engage in longer sessions. This makes them very valuable as voice chatters are both more active users and are creating user-generated content that extends the experience offered by the game or metaverse.
* However, voice chat is the top channel for online harassment in online games, and we have already seen that behavior translate directly over to metaverses.
* Online harassment is rising in frequency and severity over the past five years.
* This takes a toll on the users and also has very real costs for the gaming platform. Nearly one-third of consumers subjected to online harassment avoid games with reputations for toxicity, and more than one-in-four have left games due to bad behavior by other users.
* Moderating voice chat is more difficult and costly than text chat.
* New techniques around Speech to Text (STT) training and on-device processing are poised to revolutionize voice chat moderation and become standard features for emerging metaverses. Without these technologies, metaverses are at undue risk that a few bad actors will undermine adoption before it even gets started.

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  title="4 Key Takeaways on Voice Moderation in Online Gaming & the Metaverse"
  description="We interviewed 20+ experts in the Online Gaming & Metaverse space. Here are the key takeaways for Voice Moderation."
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### Online Harassment is Getting More Severe

“Roughly four-in-ten Americans have experienced online harassment,” says the [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/01/13/the-state-of-online-harassment/).  While the total share of consumers reporting a harassment experience didn’t change between 2017 and 2021, the research organization says, “more severe encounters have become more common.” This includes significant rises in physical threats, stalking, and sexual harassment. 

![](pi_2021.01.13_online-harrasment_0-01-1.webp)

While the overall harassment numbers from Pew were flat at 41% since 2017, users experiencing the more severe behaviors rose from 18% to 25%. Studies show that users actively avoid online games and stop using the games where harassment is common. Metaverse spaces share many characteristics of games and that will invariably include harassment. Oh, and the number one channel for harassment in games is … you guessed it … voice chat. 

### The Problem for Metaverse Developers

This presents a problem for metaverse developers. According to the [Anti-Defamation League (ADL)](https://www.adl.org/resources/report/hate-no-game-harassment-and-positive-social-experiences-online-games-2021), “Abusers, who use voice chat in online games to target individuals, often evade detection because the tools and techniques to detect hate and harassment within a game’s voice chat lag behind those that moderate text communication.” 

The challenges associated with moderating voice chat range from privacy to the options and timeliness of enforcing policies. These issues also exist for text chat moderation. However, voice chat has two other big issues in terms of accuracy and cost. Voice chat must first be accurately transcribed from speech to text before analysis can take place. Transcription technology has advanced considerably outside the gaming world over the past decade, but it is not optimized for monitoring online harassment in dynamic digital environments. 

You might think that a simple solution would be just to turn off text and voice chat to avoid these problems. However, that runs counter to the evolution of gaming becoming more social. 

### Voice Chat Improves the User Experience

Studies show that there are many positive psychological effects of adding social communication to games that enhance the overall experience. Games without chat are at a disadvantage to those with it. This is likely to have an even greater impact in metaverses where gaming is not the central activity. Social connectivity will be an essential feature. That means voice chat moderation must be a top priority for metaverse builders. 

An Oxford Academic study from 2007 found that “voice chat leads to stronger bonds and deeper empathy than text chat. As Subspace put it in 2021, “Voice deepens the immersive world, helps forge social bonds, and strengthens online play.” 

![](axelbolt_chart_retention-vivox_0.webp)

To put more concrete numbers to this, [Axlebolt Studios](https://unity.com/case-study/axlebolt-standoff-2) found that 90-day player retention rose by 63% after implementing voice chat. The average revenue per user (ARPU) also rose by 12%. Axelbolt Studio’s Salah Sivushkove told Unity in an interview, “voice chat is unequivocally a must-have mechanic for multiplayer games.”

### What Metaverses Must Learn from Multiplayer Games

The ADL [revealed](https://www.adl.org/resources/report/hate-no-game-harassment-and-positive-social-experiences-online-games-2021) concerning results for online gaming in 2021. A national survey found that “Five out of six adults (83%) ages 18-45 experienced harassment in online multiplayer games—representing over 80 million adult gamers.” That figure has risen for three straight years. In addition, “Three out of five young people (60%) ages 13-17 experienced harassment in online multiplayer games—representing nearly 14 million young gamers.”

The ADL’s [2020 report](https://www.adl.org/resources/report/free-play-hate-harassment-and-positive-social-experience-online-games-2020) indicated that about half of the harassment took place in voice chat during gameplay. Text chat harassment during gameplay totaled 39% while out-of-match voice chat was again higher in terms of bad behavior at 28% to 22%. 

![](free-to-play-800-6.png)

That same year 28% of online gamers avoided specific games due to their reputation for online harassment and 22% stopped playing. By 2021, those figures rose to 30% and 27% respectively. This means there is a very real economic cost of toxic behavior to game makers beyond the human impact. 

Riot Games recognized this problem could no longer be ignored for its Valorant title last year. The company [announced](https://www.makeuseof.com/riot-games-recording-valorant-voice-chats/) that it was changing the terms of service and would begin recording and analyzing voice chats. A blog post announcing the change included the comments:

“Disruptive behavior on voice comms is a huge pain point for a lot of players. And we believe one of the ways to combat it is by providing quick and accurate ways to report abuse or harassment so we know when to take action. We also need clear evidence to verify violations of behavioral policies before we take action and to help us share with players on why a particular behavior may have resulted in a penalty.”

Unfortunately, we already know that this isn’t just an issue for online games. A woman in the UK claimed earlier this year that she had been verbally and sexually harassed in Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse. She wrote on [Medium](https://medium.com/kabuni/fiction-vs-non-fiction-98aa0098f3b0), “Within 60 seconds of joining — I was verbally and sexually harassed — 3–4 male avatars, with male voices…A horrible experience that happened so fast and before I could even think about putting the safety barrier in place. I froze.”

### Voice Chat in the Metaverse

[Motley Fool](https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/13/prediction-5-billion-people-will-be-in-the-metaver/) says, “there are approximately 400 million users of metaverse and metaverse-like worlds. By 2030, Citi predicts there could be up to 5 billion.” Some parts of the online gaming world already fall into that metaverse-like category. They offer insight into how the metaverse spaces will evolve and challenges they are sure to face. 

Communication in the metaverse will not be typing and text-first. It will be speaking and voice-first. You are using your hands to navigate metaverse virtual worlds. The only practical way to communicate most of the time is by voice. Otherwise, you wind up with a start-and-stop experience where you are constantly waiting for someone to finish typing or stop moving so they can type and communicate. Even non-gaming metaverse experiences are subject to these interactive dynamics. 

Moreover, the need for policing may not be limited to humans in the metaverse. Recall Microsoft’s infamous Tay chatbot deployed to Twitter. “Microsoft is battling to control the public relations damage done by its ‘millennial’ chatbot, which turned into a genocide-supporting Nazi less than 24 hours after it was let loose on the internet,” said an article in USA Today. 

Many metaverses are deploying non-player characters (NPCs), and some of those have learning engines that could eventually generate conversations that stray from the normal script and head into “Microsoft Tay territory.” This would be a disaster because the metaverse wouldn’t even be able to assign the blame to a user. The question for metaverse builders is how to manage the risk. 

### The Challenge

The key issues of moderating voice chat boil down to accuracy and cost. Both relate to the conversion of Speech to Text that takes place before any analysis can be conducted. If the transcript is inaccurate, then you risk missing harassing behavior or mistakenly labeling non-harassing voice chat as toxic and alienating an innocent user. Neither of these outcomes are good for users or the metaverse community.   

#### STT Accuracy Challenge Examples

Speechly recently participated in the famous Y Combinator tech startup accelerator. Over the course of that program, Speechly leaders had the opportunity to interview executives at 70 companies and ask them about their current challenges. Several specific themes around Speech to Text accuracy emerged as important. 

* “Moderation only works if the system is able to accurately monitor the conversations that are taking place.”
* “General accuracy isn’t good enough…Businesses need the ability to build a Speech to Text model for their specific use case."

#### STT Cost Challenge Examples

We also learned that the Speech to Text solutions are too costly for many games and metaverses. While offerings from Google and Amazon are easy to access, their cost can be prohibitive at scale. The transcription is an added cost beyond what you encounter with text chat and can exceed $10,000 per day even for relatively small user bases of under 100k DAU. 

* “Cost is problematic for us because of the amount of data processed on a daily basis.” 
* “The cost \[of STT] was so limiting that we had to optimize our approach to the point that it became not worth it.”
* “The cost of Speech to Text technology is so high that it has forced companies that deal with moderation problems to get creative in how and when they use Speech to Text and therefore have to be creative on what to monitor rather than being able to monitor everything. Or, they have to forgo voice moderation altogether.”

It is a difficult situation for game and metaverse builders. They need to have voice chat as a feature. It is essential that voice chat is moderated. The cost of traditional Speech to Text transcription solutions is too high to be economically viable. Something has to give. 

### The Solution

At Speechly, we have worked alongside select partners to address the challenges around Accuracy and Cost with Speech to Text when using it for Voice Chat Moderation. With our API, developers have the ability to train Speech to Text models for their specific use case rather than using a generalized model. This helps create Voice Moderation that is accurate for the words that matter for the use case at hand.

Speechly also can be deployed On-Device or On-Premise. This results in a more cost-effective and private solution. Running Speech to Text On-Device or On-Premise can be up to 100x cheaper than the cloud. Also, this option is private by design as the Voice Chat data is never required to leave the users device or your company's data center.

If you are interested in learning more about how to use Speech to Text technology for Voice Chat Moderation, [contact us](https://www.speechly.com/contact) to become a partner!

### Whats Next

Metaverse adoption is taking off. With more than 400 million users today and the expectation of five-to-tenfold growth, every problem is going to require a scalable solution. Gaming has provided metaverse builders with an early warning about what to expect. Voice chat will be a key feature for metaverse spaces but it comes with the risk of harassment and toxicity. Those risks have very real consequences in terms of user adoption, experience, and retention. The significant challenges in implementing voice chat moderation that go beyond text chat is a complicating factor. However, there are next technologies and techniques arising just in time for the Cambrian metaverse explosion.

Cover Photo by [Jessica Lewis](https://unsplash.com/@jessicalewiscreative?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/virtual-reality?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

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Voice chat is the top channel for online harassment in games, and that will translate directly over to metaverses if unaccounted for.

Why Voice Chat Moderation Can Make-or-Break a Metaverse


Finnish startup [ZOAN](https://zoan.fi/) is a VR studio that specializes in building VR/AR services for marketing, travel, education and real estate. ZOAN is a company of over 30 professionals spanning three continents. ZOAN is cooperating with Speechly to build next-generation VR and AR services for both industry professionals and consumers.

**Sami Heinonen**, the project manager of ZOAN still sees issues in the human-computer interaction in VR services. "We want to remove the barriers for natural interaction and start using voice and touch, the most natural interfaces for humans in our solutions.", says Heinonen.

Currently virtual environments usually require hand controllers for user input. To build more immersive experiences, better input technologies are needed. Voice would be the most natural option for both user input and as a feedback system from computer to human.

"There's a lot of industry specific tasks that require employees to look for meaningful data from many different displays. This could be better facilitated with voice technology and VR, Heinonen says.

One of the key differentiators of [Speechly’s technology against current offering](/technology/) is it's real-time natural speech understanding. This improves user experience, because the feedback to user can be almost instanteous. Another important feature that's not available on smart speaker platforms is the ability to train the AI model for specific use cases.

"When user wants to accomplish a task by using Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, first the device sends the audio for complete speech-to-text transcription to cloud. After the sentence is transformed into text, it's sent to another service that understands what is being requested and actually performs the task. Speechly is doing these two tasks simultaneously, just like a human. This makes it faster and smarter than current providers", tells **Otto Söderlund**, the CEO of Speechly.

The first application by ZOAN and Speechly is a virtual reality real estate tool that allows users to paint walls and change materials of the house by using voice. Future plans include bringing voice control into industry services such as airport maintenance.

"We are still in closed beta and can only accomodate certain amount of new developers on our platform. ZOAN is an interesting developer partner because the cooperation allows us to build our integrations for our technology to platforms such as Unity and Unreal 3D", Söderlund says.


ZOAN is a Finnish startup that specializes in VR and AR solutions. ZOAN is using Speechly to enable immersive hands-free control of their VR environments.

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