Assessing Effectiveness and Interpretability of Light Behaviors in Smart Speakers

Kunchay, Sahiti; Abdullah, Saeed

doi:10.1145/3469595.3469610

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In addition, changes in tone and other non-content qualities of user interaction with the smart speaker could be explored as potential triggers for introducing backchanneling cues into the conversation. Furthermore, design efforts can be geared toward conveying backchanneling via non-auditory means (e.g., using light behaviors [43,44]) which can be not only be more subtle and less intrusive, but also more accessible, especially for hearing-impaired users [8,9].…”

Section: Implications For Design and Usability Of Smart Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alexa as an Active Listener: How Backchanneling Can Elicit Self-Disclosure and Promote User Experience

Cho,

Motalebi,

Sundar

et al. 2022

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Active listening is a well-known skill applied in human communication to build intimacy and elicit selfdisclosure to support a wide variety of cooperative tasks. When applied to conversational UIs, active listening from machines can also elicit greater self-disclosure by signaling to the users that they are being heard, which can have positive outcomes. However, it takes considerable engineering effort and training to embed active listening skills in machines at scale, given the need to personalize active-listening cues to individual users and their specific utterances. A more generic solution is needed given the increasing use of conversational agents, especially by the growing number of socially isolated individuals. With this in mind, we developed an Amazon Alexa skill that provides privacy-preserving and pseudo-random backchanneling to indicate active listening. User study (N = 40) data show that backchanneling improves perceived degree of active listening by smart speakers. It also results in more emotional disclosure, with participants using more positive words. Perception of smart speakers as active listeners is positively associated with perceived emotional support. Interview data corroborate the feasibility of using smart speakers to provide emotional support. These findings have important implications for smart speaker interaction design in several domains of cooperative work and social computing.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms; Personal digital assistants; • Applied computing → Consumer health.

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Section: Implications For Design and Usability Of Smart Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%