Consumer reactions to speech at the ATM user interface

This paper describes several on-going activities addressing user acceptance and usability issues associated with voice solutions at the Automated Teller Machine (A TM) consumer interface. This work-in-progress forms part of a Technology Development Group research initiative aimed at assessing the overall suitability of voice, in the form of verification and recognition, as a means of interacting with A TMs. Speaker verification as an alternative to PIN and the prospects for voice recognition as a means of interacting with ATMs are being assessed in terms of technical and performance issues. However, to date, little concrete data are available to provide insight into the end-users' perspective of such interactions.
The background to and output from Technology Development projects directed to gain an understanding of the issues is described in this short paper. An overview of focus groups, limited field-trails and laboratory-based experimental work undertaken is provided, together with a general description of the some of the main user acceptance or usability issues that have arisen. The majority of the work presented in this paper has been conducted by the Industrial Ergonomics Group at the University of Birmingham who work in partnership with Cognitive Engineering, Technology Development, on projects of this type.