Design and evaluation of a non-verbal voice-controlled cursor for point-and-click tasks

A voice-controlled cursor is an alternative to traditional mouse for users having difficulties in moving fingers, hands, or arms. In this paper, we report a proposed voice-controlled cursor suitable for point-and-click tasks by applying the grid-based concept of accessing locations on a computer display with the use of non-verbal sounds, which are humming sounds with two different pitch values and a short alveolar fricative sound, to select desired grid cell and to perform the mouse click event. It is shown in the experiments that the proposed method can achieve a higher accuracy rate, a shorter response time, and a better user preference than the traditional Mouse Grid that recognizes spoken digits as its main cell selection mechanism.