The Application Development Experiences of an Enterprise Engineer

The Next Old New way of Thinking About App Interfaces

Posted by bsstahl on 2014-04-04 and Filed Under: development 

One thing I've noticed during my 30 years in software engineering is that everything old eventually becomes new again.  If you have a particular skill or preferred methodology that seems to have become irrelevant,  just wait a while, it is likely to return in some form or another.  In this case, it seems that recent announcements by Microsoft about how developers will be able to leverage the power of Cortana, are likely to revitalize the need for text processing as an input to the apps we build.

At one time, many years ago, we had two primary methods of letting the computer know what path we wanted to take within an application; we could select a value from a displayed (textual) menu, or, if we were getting fancy, we could provide an input box that the user could type commands into.  This latter technique was often the purview of text-only adventure games and inputs came in the form "move left" and "look east".  While neither of these input methods was particularly exciting or "natural" to use today's parlance, it was only text input that allowed the full flexibility of executing nearly any application action from any location.  Now that Microsoft has announce that developers on Windows Phone, and likely other platforms, will be able to leverage the platform's built-in digital assistant named "Cortana" and receive inputs into their applications as text input translated from the user's speech (or directly as text typed into Cortana's input box) it makes sense for us to start thinking about our application inputs in this way again. That is, we want to consider, for each action a user might take, how the user might trigger that action by voice command.

It should be fairly easy to shift to this mindset if we simply imagine, on our user interfaces, a text box where the user could type a command to the app.  The commands that the user might type into this box are the commands we need to enable using the provided speech input APIs.  If we start thinking about inputs in this way now, it might help to shape our user interfaces in ways that make speech input more natural, and our applications more useful, in the coming years. Of course, this also gives us the added benefit of allowing us to reuse our old text parsing skills from that time when we wrote that adventure game…

Tags: ai interface microsoft phone professional development skill ux