fatruchir

Continuing on the journey to get my hands dirty with voice UIs - I put down some user perceived latency metrics I was seeing when building VUIs.

Key points: - I used the 'pipeline' approach of STT + LLM + TTS (as opposed to the S2S approach eg: gpt-realtime) - This approach (with my specific setup) - yielded latency far greater than the 500ms target, where conversations feel "natural" and there aren't any awkward silences - With the LLM as gpt-5-mini I saw latency at ~1.4s and with the LLM as Llama 3.1-8b on Cerebras I saws 1.1s

I've been trying to get some hands-on experience building voice based experiences and put down some of the lessons I learnt + questions that came up.

Some key points: - STT (speech to text) models are a new source of errors in input - which has impact on UX - Some UI elements don't have equivalents in voice, eg: drop downs - STT + TTS (text to speech) still struggle with names, addresses, food items which etc which are not anglo-saxon in origin + a few other points - check out the post

Would be great to hear and learn from your experiences building voice forms and experiences.

Disclaimer: I'm no UX expert and have not read those O Riley books that talk about building VUIs

All I really want is to be able to listen to what my friends are listening to - know what's the latest track their jamming to - and this seems to go in that direction

@OmarShehata - do you use the Twitter API to get this data? Is it a simple process to get access?

I had put on a couple of pounds in late 2019 because of too much sugar in the diet (can't resist them &🧁) but just couldn't seem to cut down (you're out with friends and you think - just one bite and poof - cookie is over!).

Then friend and I came up with a "game" - we chose rules (zero dessert on weekdays + 2 pieces allowed on weekends) - and then a price (Rs. 200) - which we would pay the other when one slipped up on the rules - and surprisingly - it worked well! Consumption went over time and I started shedding the extra pounds I had put on.

Things got fun + interesting - a competitive vibe emerged b/w 2 of us which acted as forcing function to not eat sugar, lots of trash talk happened, we came up with a concept of a free pass (had a bad day and just wanted some dessert!) to give flexibility.

So I built an app around this concept - NoMo: https://playnomo.com

Looking to change something about yourself but can't seem to follow through? Like: 1. Too much sugar/desserts? 🧁 2. Too much junk food? (McDonalds fries are my weakness!) 3. Not drinking 8 glasses of water a day?

Anything at all - YOU can pick the rules you + friend want to follow & then you pick the price that works for you!

NoMo is a way to do that with the help of friends/loved ones - Give it a shot - all feedback, suggestions are welcome :)

Added a privacy policy (of sorts). Let me know what you think!

Haha, yeah I read that exact piece.

I assumed here that potential end users in India would know what a dry day is. Maybe I'll revisit this assumption if more feedback like this comes in. Thanks!

yeah, agree. But SMS was the quickest to get started - depending on traction - can add other channels as well - Email/Whatsapp/IVR/website notifications.

Yes, privacy policy seems to be universal feedback. Will add that for sure.

yeah, gotta add a formal privacy policy. It'll look something like: - Will never share your data without your explicit consent

- Don't use any 3rd party trackers (not even GA) so no data shared with them

- Data stored in India (AWS) in a server owned by me

Anything else you think I should cover?

The Problem: A bunch of friends and you land up at a bar/wine shop and it turns out to be a dry day and then you go - doh! (one friend even went to Goa for a weekend only to realise it was a dry day)

Solution: I decided to build this simple SMS based reminder service which would remind you of all the dry days in the year!

Let me know what you guys think!