Why we don’t listen?
We try desperately to tell our voice command interfaces what we are looking for, but at the end of the day only 7% of or our communication is made up of words. The rest is body language and tone, which are absent in a conversation with a machine.
Talking to Siri can often feel like talking to a kindergartner: you ask a simple question only to be flooded with information that is only 2% relevant to your original request. Once you’ve made your request, the information comes rushing in and you cannot pause, stop, or dig deeper into any portion of it until Siri has finished her response.
Voice commands have taught us the hard way that there are two key components to every good conversation: speaking and listening. In our first blog post, we noted that voice commands are frustrating and not interactive. In this article, we address the second half of the problem — the listening experience.
While we can’t always control what we hear, we can control what we listen to. We engage in dynamic conversations, and choose to scroll through information that is useful to us. This makes the listening experience enjoyable. When voice interfaces become frustrating or don’t address our needs, we often return to reading while on-the-go. Whether we are on a run and searching for radio stations, or walking and checking our text messages, we end up with our heads down absorbed in our phones while clumsily bumping into strangers.
This multi-tasking is not only dangerous, but also terribly inefficient. When we are reading we process information at 8 Kbits/s — or 200 words per minute. While listening, however, we process information at 16 Kbits/s — or 400 words per minute.
This means that you’re not only missing out on the world around you when you’re reading, but you’re only half of what you could absorb if you were listening to that same information. The pros and cons of listening and reading go on:
Woudn’t it be great to make listening as convenient as reading?
With O6, we are building a new paradigm that addresses the limitations of both voice commands and reading, by providing precision control over the listening experience in ways previously not possible.
Interested in learning more? Check it out here.
