Ubiquitous Mail: Speech and Graphical User Interfaces to an Integrated Voice/E-Mail Mailbox

This paper describes the design of a prototype mailbox which allows access to voice mail and e-mail using speech and graphical user interfaces. Through the prototype and user study reported here, we explored several questions. One set of questions concerns how to design an interface based on recognized and recorded speech as input, and recorded and computer-generated text-to-speech as output. Our study suggested that the biggest problem people had with the speech interface was finding specific messages quickly; once they found the desired message they had no problem carrying out a variety of operations. Another set of issues concerns how to design speech and graphical user interfaces which facilitate transfer between the two interface styles. We took the view that the two interfaces should provide a consistent view of the mailbox and the consequences of operations on the mailbox. The specific dialogs should depend on the characteristics of the interface modalities. We found evidence for positive transfer between the interfaces using this approach.