Speaking versus Typing

      Mike Cohen and Maryam Kamvar Garrett, Google

mcohengoogle.com

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University February 5, 2010, 12:50pm, Gates B01

We will present search patterns across 3 different devices and 2 input modalities, and discuss UI implications of these findings. This work is based on two logs-based studies done over the past year. The first investigates search patterns across three platforms: computers, smartphones and conventional mobile phones. Our goal is to understand how mobile search users differ from computer-based search users, and we focus heavily on the distribution and variability of tasks that users perform from each platform. The second study investigates web search patterns on smartphones across two query input modalities, typing and speaking, in order to understand the factors that are correlated with a users' decision to speak a query rather than type it.

Mike Cohen joined Google in 2004 to initiate and now lead the company's speech technology efforts. Prior to joining Google, Mike was at Nuance Communications for ten years, which he co-founded to develop over-the-telephone spoken language applications. While at Nuance he coauthored the book "Voice User Interface Design" (Addison-Wesley, 2004). Earlier, Mike spent more than ten years at SRI, where he was principal investigator on a series of DARPA projects which included research in acoustic modeling, pronunciation modeling, and the development of spoken language understanding systems. Mike has a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, and received a lifetime achievement award at the 2004 SpeechTek conference.

Maryam Kamvar Garrett is a senior research scientist at Google. She has been working in the mobile space at Google since 2004, when Google's only mobile offering was a wimpy WML search interface. She has published several papers on mobile search trends, tracking how usage patterns evolve as users and devices become more sophisticated. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia in 2008. She currently resides in Boston, MA and works out of Google's Cambridge office.

The talks are open to the public. They are in the Gates Building, Room B01 in the basement. The nearest public parking is in the structure at Campus Drive and Roth Way.

View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine.

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