Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life

By Martin Porcheron, J. Fischer, Stuart Reeves, S. Sharples. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018

688 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are becoming ubiquitously available, being embedded both into everyday mobility via smartphones, and into the life of the home via 'assistant' devices. Yet, exactly how users of such devices practically thread that use into their everyday social interactions remains underexplored. By collecting and studying audio data from month-long deployments of the Amazon Echo in participants' homes-informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis-our study documents the methodical practices of VUI users, and how that use is accomplished in the complex social life of the home. Data we present shows how the device is made accountable to and embedded into conversational settings like family dinners where various simultaneous activities are being achieved. We discuss how the VUI is finely coordinated with the sequential organisation of talk. Finally, we locate implications for the accountability of VUI interaction, request and response design, and raise conceptual challenges to the notion of designing 'conversational' interfaces.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ace92c22a895d5e23e58de8d738df8e500d8d79

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Citations in the corpus

Alexa, Are You Listening? (2018, background): “…allow participants to reflect on their interaction with the speaker, including potentially unspoken thoughts and considerations, rather than introducing an additional recorder to capture audio before and after an interaction [43] or asking participants to give us their smart speakers’ audio logs.”
Empathy Is All You Need: How a Conversational Agent Should Respond to Verbal Abuse (2020, background): “There are various ways of naming those machines that people can ‘talk to’, including conversational agents and intelligent personal assistants [50].”
Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction (2019, background): “This scenario has also had a recent resurgence of interest given advances in natural language processing and embedded devices driving the proliferation of conversational agents [26, 29, 35].”
What Makes a Good Conversation?: Challenges in Designing Truly Conversational Agents (2019, background): “Speaking to agents currently falls short of conversational dialogue [37, 39, 42], ar X iv :1 90 1.”
BigBlueBot: teaching strategies for successful human-agent interactions (2019, background): “Regarding successful interactions with conversational systems, Porcheron et al. conducted a field study of interactions with Amazon Alexa inside the home and found a significant rate of dialog failures [30].”