What is natural language interaction in interface design?
Natural language interaction (NLI) is an interaction style that allows users to interact with computers in a humanlike conversational way. Through NLI, users can converse with computers just like they do with other humans.
Natural language is the way people communicate with each other. The opposite is a computer language, such as programming languages used to communicate with machines. Computers generally can not understand and interpret natural languages. However, NLI technologies have made it possible to interact with devices using natural languages.
How does natural language interaction work?
Natural language interaction uses natural language processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence, to make computers understand the user’s commands. The commands received by the computer are parsed into sentences and phrases. These are then identified, and the individual actions are performed.
Advantages and disadvantages
The following table summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of using NLI in interface design.
Advantages | Disadvantages |
Interfaces using NLI are easier to use as the communication is conversational. | Natural language is ambiguous. Determining the meaning of a command can be difficult for the computer and might result in erroneous outputs. |
NLI as an interaction style produces high satisfaction levels in users as they are more enjoyable to use. | Processing natural languages can take up more processing time than other interaction styles. |
NLI is helpful for users with medical disabilities, such as blind users who can only interact with the computer using voice commands. | NLI can only be used to perform a restricted number of commands that have been taught to the computer. |
NLI can be combined with other interaction styles, such as gestures, to reduce contextual ambiguity. | Users associate high expectations with NLI interfaces, considering them humanlike. The expectations are sometimes not met by the system's capabilities. |
Users do not have to learn any syntax or a new language, so an interface using NLI is easy to learn for novice users. | Humans speak in various dialects and sentence structures, which can be difficult to process when speech recognition is used for NLI. |
Examples
NLI is commonly used for speech recognition. Many intelligent personal assistants use NLI as the interaction style. Some of the widely used ones are Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. These also use keywords to activate natural language recognition, such as the use of "Hey Google" by Google Assistant.
Text recognition is another example of NLI. Online chatbots are one of the most commonly found examples of text-based NLI.
Conclusion
NLI is emerging as a popular way of interacting with machines. Despite the drawbacks, it has become increasingly favorable among users due to the ease of use and high satisfaction levels.
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