Re-Post: Utterance-Based Communication (J. Higginbotham)

Utterance-Based Communication:
One Voice No Longer Fits All

An Interview with Jeff Higginbotham, Ph.D., Partner, AAC-RERC;
Professor, Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo

For designers of utterance-based communication devices, conversational interaction is no longer a one-voice activity, declares University at Buffalo professor and AAC-RERC Partner Jeff Higginbotham. “In addition to adopting the right-tool-for-the-right-task concept,” he remarks, “we’re beginning to design devices that can be utilized by both partners in a communication activity.

Surprisingly, Dr. Higginbotham points out, “many device manufacturers don’t promote the reality that the device user’s conversation partners may read the display screens as the words appear so that they can respond quickly and keep the conversation going.”
Among manufacturers, he adds, “this is a major design irony; their devices are developed to accommodate an individual user model and don’t provide for the possibility – in fact, the likelihood – that the user’s conversation partner will become a user of the device as well.

“When we zeroed in on the problems that can arise in an interaction involving an utterance-based communication device we learned that those problems were not exclusively associated with the device user. These issues also involve the attentional limitations and expectancies of the partner who is engaged with the user of the device, the quality and appropriateness of the synthetic speech as it’s being produced and the availability of other modes of representing information.”

CLICK HERE to read the remainder of the Higginbotham article. 

The remaining paragraph headings:

Face2Face: Keeping Conversation Participants in Time

Less Oversight for Proliferating Non-dedicated Technologies  

Enter inTra

Consistent with Dr. Higginbotham’s conviction that socially inclusive interaction requires the participation of at least two individuals and the coordination of expression between them in time, the Face2Face inTra project has developed a front-facing display and a technology that couples the transcribed utterances of the communications partner with the utterance spoken by the AAC user

InTra as a Classroom

WebCrawler is Just-In-Time

Timing Remains an Issue, albeit Less of One

Transferring the Technology     

The Future: Internet Connectivity; GPS in the Wings 

RESOURCES