Speech Dialogue Design

The practice of designing the structure, content, ordering, and delivery of information presented through synthetic speech in computer interfaces. Effective speech dialogue design considers psycholinguistic principles such as the recency effect (items heard last are best remembered), appropriate pause placement at grammatical boundaries rather than arbitrary line breaks, information ordering that places the most important content where it will be best retained, and minimizing the total quantity of speech to reduce cognitive load. In accessibility, speech dialogue design is critical for screen readers and other speech-based assistive technologies, where poor design can make information difficult to comprehend even when the technical speech output is functioning correctly.