Books on Speech: A Voice Designer’s Reading List
Dive deeper into the world of VUI with a few key textbooks on the subject (Updated Jan 2020)
Are you interested in voice design but never had any exposure to training in your own schooling? An extremely common question is “what should I read to get started?” In that vein, I’d like to share the books I recommend to the folks in my “Giving Voice to Your Voice Designs” workshop. May these send you down the path towards creating a successful voice user interface!
Full disclosure: the links below are Amazon affiliate links, but I only recommend books I’ve reviewed personally, and none of the authors or publishers have compensated me for these recommendations. Do you have any books you’d recommend that aren’t listed here? Please feel free to share them in the comments.
Wired for Speech (by Clifford Nass)
Available at Amazon on Kindle or paperback.
Before you get into the deep details about how to design for voice, I highly recommend starting with the excellent Wired for Speech by the late Stanford researcher Clifford Nass. This book, based on a number of research studies and Cliff’s consulting work with a variety of companies in multiple industries, examines the psychological impact of speech interfaces that aren’t normally encountered in purely visual scenarios.
For those particularly interested in the “gendered voices” discussion- aka “why are so many voice assistants women?”-this is required reading. It won’t answer that question for you, but it will give you a better understanding of how gender impacts perception when using a voice user interface.
Designing Voice User Interfaces (by Cathy Pearl)
Available at Amazon on Kindle or paperback.
The most recent textbook on the market is Designing Voice User Interfaces by Cathy Pearl. As a former employee at Nuance, one of the biggest original players in the voice user interfaces space, she brings to bear a great deal of experience in the space.
Cathy walks through a variety of topics — from some basic design recommendations to example research techniques and an entire chapter devoted to pairing a visual avatar with a spoken interface.
Voice User Interface Design (by Giangola and Balogh)
Paperback and used copies are available on Amazon.
This textbook is older, but a classic that you’ll find on the desk of many designers behind your favorite voice assistants. It was published at a time when the most common voice interfaces were interactive phone systems (IVR), and is written with that goal in mind. Even still, the content is still so relevant that Cathy Pearl referenced the book several times in her own more recent textbook.
In particular, this book is a useful tool for those looking to get deeper into the design deliverables — I found it to be the strongest example of flow and state design for voice interfaces.
Unfortunately, there is no digital version available, and it’s a bit pricier than the other options — but I found an affordable used copy, and it may still be worth it for you, particularly if you’re designing for an audio-only system.
The Voice in the Machine: Building Computers that Understand Speech (by Roberto Pieraccini)
Available on Amazon in paperback.
For those who want to really, deeply understand the technology driving voice interaction, this is your book. This book gets down to fundamentals, breaking down voice recognition at the acoustic and algorithmic level and bringing you along the full historical technology journey in the process. It’s not a design book per se, but a very helpful book nonetheless.
Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences (by Cheryl Platz)
Available: Rosenfeld Media, or at Amazon (Kindle or paperback)
In December of 2020 I published my first book, tying the world of voice design together with the rest of the design world in an attempt to provide a design manual for those looking to create unified experiences not unlike the bridge of Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise. It’s not your first book heading into voice design; but if you’re looking to incorporate voice into a broader experience this should be your next stop.
The Man Who Lied to his Laptop (by Clifford Nass)
Available on Amazon on Kindle or paperback.
If you’ve worked your way through the first books and are still hungry for more, I recommend circling back to the work of Clifford Nass and continuing with The Man Who Lied to His Laptop. While the book is not specifically devoted to voice user interfaces, several of the examples and studies are directly applicable — and many of the others are relevant from the perspective of customers anthropomorphizing their devices.
Online Reference Materials
For a better understanding of the logistics behind shipping a 3rd party skill on a major voice platform with some free design guidance along the way, Amazon’s Alexa Voice Design Guide and Google’s Conversation Design Guide (which also applies to chatbot implementations) are two excellent places to start.
And may the voice be with you!
Cheryl Platz has worked on a variety of voice user interfaces including the Echo Look and Echo Show, Amazon’s Alexa platform, Windows Automotive, and Cortana. As founder of design education company Ideaplatz, Cheryl is also touring worldwide with her acclaimed natural user interface talks and workshops.
