The effects of tones and time pressure on the user experience of voice input on mobile devices for Mandarin Chinese: an experimental study

This study experimented with mobile devices to investigate the effects of tones and time pressure on the voice input experience for Mandarin Chinese. Voice input for Mandarin Chinese is gaining popularity, and its implementation on mobile devices has recently developed very rapidly. Previous studies have focused mainly on technical considerations for designing a voice input system and have not investigated the user experience of voice input. Two experiments were conducted to test single-character and two-character phrases. Four measurements, the number of errors, user satisfaction, mental workload, and skin conductance, were gathered from sixty-four participants for each experiment. The results indicated that Mandarin tones had a significant influence on the number of errors and user satisfaction, and time pressure significantly influenced all measurements. Specifically, the falling-rising tone produced the highest number of errors, and the rising tone led to the lowest satisfaction. A high level of time pressure resulted in low satisfaction, a high mental workload, and high skin conductance. The results indicated that (a) Mandarin tones significantly affected error rates and user satisfaction, and (b) time pressure had a significant effect on user experience. The findings have design implications for voice input systems in terms of user experience.