The best Interface is No Interface?

Minimalism has come back in style in Europe and rumours of Steve Jobs and a new form of voice interface just won't go away. The natural extent of minimalism, the singularity in the graphics universe, is of course, no graphics at all. Keen to find out what this would mean, I asked a few colleagues at Alticast to create a voice controlled interface and gave them just a few working days.

The results, using Siri Proxy, Siri from Apple, an iPhone 4S and some custom software on a commercial set top box can be seen below.



So what did we learn?

• Voice is very useful for some functions, pointless for others. Search in particular could be very useful in speech.
  
• Graphics must re-inforce each command on the screen AND a voice must respond simultaneously, otherwise the viewer feels lost.
• Remote voice recognition (like Siri) has too much lag to be entirely comfortable and speech should be recognised locally.
• "next episode" means different things to different people (next in schedule, next in series etc.)
• Voice complements but does not replace on screen graphics.

Thanks to Maciek and Rafal who did all the hard work on this.