Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life

Abstract

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.

Mapping Perceptions of Humanness in Intelligent Personal Assistant Interaction

“…Research [15,16,20,38,40,44] has consistently identified that humanness is fundamental to speech interface design, supporting the metaphor of human dialogue for interaction. It is currently unclear what dimensions are important in users' conceptualisation of humanness and how people see speech interface functionality through this lens.…”

What Makes a Good Conversation?

“…The recent popularity of IPA devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home has generated considerable interest in the HCI community [40,42]. Recent emphasis in HCI has been on understanding user experiences of interactions with IPAs.…”

“…These include checking the weather, setting reminders, calling and messaging, playing music, launching other applications, information seeking, and interacting with Internet of Things (IoT) devices [2,20,35,38,54]. Although these devices promise much through their implied humanness [20], they fall short of the reflexive and adaptive interactivity that occurs in most human-human conversation [42]. Instead interactions revolve around brief question/answer or user-instructions/system-confirmation dialogues [42].…”

“…This is a far cry from the elaborative, contextual social talk seen in human conversation [28]. The highly functional and utilitarian nature of IPA interaction has led to suggestions that 'conversation' is a poor description of the current interaction experience [37,42]. This deficit has motivated a number of efforts to improve the conversational capabilities in such agents [26,41].…”

“…The IPA market alone is predicted to reach $9 billion by the early 2020s [14]. Speaking to agents currently falls short of conversational dialogue [37,39,42], instead offering interactions that are constrained and task oriented. Although not necessarily desirable for all interactions, more human-like conversational ability could be important in supporting long-term human-agent interaction.…”