Hands and Eyes Free Search

The main focus of IR interface research and development has been on graphical user interfaces. However, a range of user needs are emerging that will drive us to focus increasingly on the challenge of building search engines where both queries and search results are spoken. Now is the time to examine this topic as speech recognition error rates are steadily dropping and are crossing thresholds where text can be reliably recognised. In this talk, I will outline some of the user groups that might need such systems, explain how existing systems, such as SIRI, Google Now, or Cortana, are incomplete solutions, and speculate on how such systems might evolve.