Does conversation lead to better searches? Investigating single-shot and multi-turn spoken searches with children

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Interactive speech technologies such as Siri and Amazon Echo allow people to search for information via speech. These systems generally take a single spoken statement or query as input, which may not be enough to fully capture the user’s information need. Therefore, multi-turn conversations have been proposed to establish more detail. A conversational approach can particularly benefit children who experience more difficulty formulating precise queries. We carried out a study with 32 children comparing multi-turn conversations with single-shot (or Query-Response) interactions. We compared the descriptions of the information needs, as well as children’s search experience. Findings indicate that more elaborate descriptions of children’s information needs (more keywords) were gathered through conversational search, leading to more focused search results compared with the Query-Response search. Further analysis of children’s responses yielded insights into their preferences for conversing with speech-based interfaces. This paper also offers design and methodological recommendations for conversational agents that support children’s information search.