A Comparison of Voice Controlled and Mouse Controlled Web Browsing

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Date
2000-09-25Author
Christian, Kevin
Kules, Bill
Shneiderman, Ben
Youssef, Adel
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Show full item recordAbstract
Voice controlled web browsers allow users to navigate by
speaking the text of a link or an associated number instead of clicking
with a mouse. One such browser is Conversa, by Conversational Computing.
This within subjects study with 18 subjects compared voice browsing with
traditional mouse-based browsing. It attempted to identify which of three
common hypertext forms (linear slide show, grid/tiled map, and
hierarchical menu) are well suited to voice navigation, and whether voice
navigation is helped by numbering links. The study shows that voice
control adds approximately 50% to the performance time for certain types
of tasks. Subjective satisfaction measures indicate that for voice
browsing, textual links are preferable to numbered links.
Keywords : Human-computer interaction, user interfaces, voice browsers,
voice recognition, web browsing
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2000-69)