Is speech the right thing for your application?

Use of speech input to, and speech output from, computer systems is spreading at a growing pace. This means that, increasingly, developers of systems and interfaces are faced with the question of whether or not to use speech input and/or speech output for the applications they are about to build. This paper presents results from a pilot test of a theory-based approach to speech functionality. The test uses a corpus of claims about speech functionality derived from recent literature on speech and multimodality.