How Do Illiterate People Interact with an Intelligent Voice Assistant?

Abstract

The use of intelligent voice assistants is enabling people who previously could not easily interact with a graphical interface to have access to digital services. However recent works have shown that voice assistants fail to attend certain types of user’s profile. Our research focus on the interaction to an IVA with people with illiterate people. An investigation was made into the use of Google Assistant by literate and illiterate people. In order to verify if the assistant can understand the commands spoken to it, an experiment was conducted with 45 people. The experiment indicates that two characteristics are essential to be improved in the IVA while interacting to illiterates: the ability to understand a more diverse and specific vocabulary of this audience, and an ability to understand the grammatical structure of sentences produced in an ad hoc manner by them. As a suggestion to minimize the problem, we think that AVI should be designed to include illiterate people, specially in developing economy countries, otherwise those assistants will be a factor to increase digital exclusion for poor populations.