Speaking and listening on the run: design for wearable audio computing

Abstract

The use of speech and auditory interaction on wearable computers can provide an awareness of events and personal messages, without requiring one's full attention or disrupting the foreground activity. A passive "handsand-eyes-free" approach is appropriate when users need convenient and timely access to remote information and communication services. Nomadic Radio is a distributed computing platform for wearable access to unified messaging via an auditory interface. We demonstrate the use of auditory cues, spatialized audio, and speech I/O in the wearable interface for passive awareness, scaleable notification and navigation/control. The architecture is designed for wired audio wearables and has been extended for distributed wireless operation.

The impact of interface metaphor and context of use on the usability of a speech-based mobile city guide service

“…Firstly, they are usually structured hierarchically, but contain little navigational information, often leading the user to become lost in the menu structure (Wolf et al 1995). Secondly, the sequential nature of speech does not allow for simultaneous browsing of information, and therefore places heavy demands on short-term memory (Schumacher et al 1995, Sawhney andSchmandt 1998). Brewster (1997) addressed these issues by using earcons as navigation cues for telephone-based interfaces, but did not extend this technique to speech only interaction with automated mobile phone services.…”

Real-time tracking of activity scheduling/schedule execution within a unified data collection framework

“…Past researches have shown that humans have the ability to handle/process simultaneous streams of input through auditory channel and focus on one of them selectively (Sawhney and Schmandt, 1998). Ideally, by saving hand and eyes' focus on the undergoing tasks, speech input and auditory output are more suited to survey needs to feed information into data-recording equipment in a timely/convenient way.…”

“…On the other hand, speech/audio interaction is in essence sequential in time. It lacks the browsing and prefetching support as offered by image/text-based display (Sawhney and Schmandt, 1998).…”

Pagers, pilots and prairie dog: Awareness via handheld devices

“…Work on Nomadic Radio by Sawnhey and Schmandt [9] has also considered diverse kinds of awareness for mobile users, but has worked to integrate and present them in a purely audio format. By comparison, our systems look and feel fairly conventional for corporate users.…”