Human Language Technologies (HLT) – Human Factors in Speech-based User Interface Design

Human Factors research involves all aspects of the way humans relate to the world around them. Our research aims to understand how people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, or varying levels of literacy and familiarity with technology, interact with telephone-based systems and other speech technologies.

Our activities include user profiling, spoken dialogue system design and usability studies. We adapt mainstream research techniques to the unique needs and infrastructure of developing regions. One of our main goals is to establish best practices in speech-based user interface design for the South African context.

The team organises User Centred Design & Usability training workshops and offers a lecture series on “Speech-based user interface design for South Africa”. Our team members are active on a number of HLT projects including, OpenPhone, Project Lwazi and Text-to-Speech technologies.

Selected publications:

C. Kuun, A. Sharma, E. Barnard and M. Davel, “Application Selection for Spoken Dialogue Systems in the Developing World”, CSIR Technical Report, South Africa, September 2007.

S. Goronzy, L. Mayfield Tomokiyo, E. Barnard and M. Davel, “Chapter 9: Other challenges: non-native speech, dialects, accents, and local interfaces”, In Multilingual Speech Processing, edited by T. Schultz and K. Kirchoff, Elsevier, April 2006.

E. Barnard, JPL Cloete, L Coetzee and H. Patel, “Towards effective telephone-based delivery of government services”, 9th International Winelands Conference, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 2003.