It’s easy to forget these days how completely immersed we are in technology, but also not too surprising considering how quickly we made it to this point. The modern smartphone, for example, isn’t even 20 years old, while the first iPhone (News - Alert) was released only seven years ago, and yet mobile devices are now a seemingly integral part of our lives. It’s not so surprising, then, that we’re facing what is being called the “digital overload.”
Digital overload — a term concocted by mobile industry experts, namely those that will be speaking at the Mobile Voice Conference in March — is exactly what it sounds like: Exposure to too much technology. More specifically, it is to be overwhelmed by increasingly complex and crowded digital interfaces.
In response, software programmers and designers have attempted to simplify interfaces. This is evident in practically every major operating system today, whether desktop or mobile. Two significant examples of this are iOS 7 and Windows 8, both of which aim to — on a visual level, at least — clean up the clutter to provide a more elegant experience.
And yet, this isn’t the perfect solution. Aside from the inherent limitations of a completely flat UI, this does nothing to address the increasing amounts of data, apps, websites, services and software updates we deal with on a daily basis.
The best way to properly address this, according to the previously mentioned industry experts, is more widespread access to voice recognition technology.
“Speech recognition and natural language understanding technology will eventually be a required overlay to every operating system,” said William Meisel, industry analyst and the program organizer for the Mobile Voice Conference, in a statement. “Rather than hunt for information or a feature of the OS or an application, you will just tell the system what you want to accomplish. Often, you can reach an objective in one statement that would take several steps in a visual interface.”
It’s tough to say with any certainty that voice-based systems and services are the future of computing, but it’s hard to argue against the popularity of virtual, voice-based apps like Siri and Google (News
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Edited by Rory J. Thompson