Designing Voice Interfaces: Back to the (Curriculum) Basics

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Voice user interfaces (VUIs) are rapidly increasing in popularity in the consumer space. This leads to a concurrent explosion of available applications for such devices, with many industries rushing to offer voice interactions for their products. This pressure is then transferred to interface designers; however, a large majority of designers have been only trained to handle the usability challenges specific to Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). Since VUIs differ significantly in design and usability from GUIs, we investigate in this paper the extent to which current educational resources prepare designers to handle the specific challenges of VUI design. For this, we conducted a preliminary scoping scan and syllabi meta review of HCI curricula at more than twenty top international HCI departments, revealing that the current offering of VUI design training within HCI education is rather limited. Based on this, we advocate for the updating of HCI curricula to incorporate VUI design, and for the development of VUI-specific pedagogical artifacts to be included in new curricula.