Voice interfaces in electronic art

Talking to computers is an old human dream but the advances in the speech synthesis and voice recognition technologies in the past decade have reached enough accuracy and reliability to help making that dream come true. Voice interfaces can be applied in a big range of scenarios, from art to medicine, and one of the most important uses of voice interfaces is related to accessibility and usability, opening options for interactions that bring possibilities where vision cannot be used or does not fit the environment. Regarding the arts, the conjunction of the internet and the open standards of VoiceXML create a new context for exploration and experimentation with voice interfaces. This paper describes the voice interfaces scenario from the point of view of art. From the first known artwork using voice to the state-of-the-art we have today, voice has increasingly being used as interface. We will describe some artworks that are part of that history and briefly present the use of VoiceXML in the construction of the voice interface of the artwork Voice Mosaic.