Speech Technology - June 2008 - (Page 15) FALL ON YOUR KNEES for the graphical user interface TIPS TO COMBINE VOICE AND VISUAL TO PIECE TOGETHER A COMPLETE USER INTERFACE By Ryan Joe (GUI)! No longer need we hack through a thicket of C-colonbackslashes to access a single file. Today we simply point and click. Or we would if only we could find the proper icon amid our desktop’s clutter. So now there’s a new problem: As the functionality of our electronics increases, our ability to comfortably interact with them decreases. When was the last time you purchased a cell phone without an instruction manual roughly the size of War and Peace? For that matter, try decoding all the colorful little hieroglyphs appearing in your word processor toolbar. “To me, the beauty of a graphical user interface when it first came out was you could, without an instruction manual, figure out how to navigate somewhere,” says Bill Meisel, president of TMA Associates. “Now you go to Microsoft Word, they get clever. They’re trying to stretch the GUI beyond where it’s really useful.” While we’re familiar with GUIs because of their ubiquity, it’s exasperatingly obvious that a single graphical modality isn’t always the optimal way to access an application within a program. It’s even more difficult on a mobile device, given the limited screen size.
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