Designing Speech and Multimodal Applications for Seniors

1. Designing Speech and Multimodal Applications for Seniors Deborah Dahl Conversational Technologies SpeechTEK 2009 New York August 24-27

2. Goals of this Session • Discuss general considerations about older users and how they impact design • Talk about hands-on experience with specific applications

3. Why Design for Seniors? • The social reasons: • Make it possible for seniors to fully benefit from technology • Use technology to assist seniors in their daily lives • Use technology to reduce social isolation • The business reasons: • Take advantage of a big and growing market • Reduce health care costs • technology-based rehab • aging in place • Improve containment in call centers

4. Kinds of Senior Applications Call center applications that are used primarily by older customers Call center applications that need to be used by a demographic that includes older users Assistive technologies that help older users in everyday life Rehab applications that help senior users improve functions that have been compromised by aging or a disease

5. Why do Voice Applications for Seniors Need Special Design Considerations? • Changes due to aging are familiar to everyone • Some of these changes can impact the use of speech applications • Aging causes many kinds of changes in all areas of life • Physical, cognitive, social, psychological… • Physical and cognitive changes may be most relevant to speech and multimodal applications

6. Physical Changes • Perceptual – vision (presbyopia, macular degeneration, cataracts), hearing loss • Motor– manual dexterity, physical mobility • Effects of chronic diseases • Diseases that affect breathing can change speech • Parkinson’s disease • Speaking ability

7. Cognitive Cognitive changes tend to not be as dramatic as physical changes • Working memory capacity can become smaller • Attention – difficulty in focusing, distractibility increase • Learning – may take longer • Processing speed – processing new information may be slower • Language comprehension– may be slower because of general slowdown in processing new information • Language production – may slow due to slower word retrieval

8. Some Specific Considerations

9. Speech-only Applications • User has to be able to hear and comprehend prompts • Speech volume, rate, vocabulary, syntactic and semantic complexity of prompts can affect comprehension and memory for choices • User has to be able to respond within the timeout period • Speaking ability doesn’t necessarily degrade with age, but people may speak more slowly • Length of speech timeout may need to be adjusted • DTMF responses may be slowed by limited dexterity or ability to see the keypad • Recognizer may need to be trained on older voices

10. Multimodal Applications GUI and speech modalities can complement each other • Text display of prompt can assist users who are hard of hearing and it can also provide a memory aid by persisting • Spoken prompts can be useful for users who can’t see well • Touch screen can assist users who can’t use a mouse • Speech input can be used when using a keyboard is too difficult

11. Summary To accommodate senior users, designers must • accommodate range of users • both old and young • older people at various ages have different needs • for rehab applications, specific disabilities • take into account the physical and cognitive changes related to aging as they apply to speech and multimodal applications

12. Discussion

13. Some Resources • Web Accessibility Initiative on Aging (WAI-AGE) http://www.w3.org/WAI/WAI-AGE/ • Phil Shinn “The Impact of IVR Voice Talent Selection on Intelligibility”, SpeechTEK 2009 • Michael Greene, “Enhancing Accessibility and Personalization Through Senior Friendly Design”, Voice Search 2009