Speed Dating with Voice User Interfaces: Understanding How Families Interact and Perceive Voice User Interfaces in a Group Setting.

Anastasia K Ostrowski,Cynthia Breazeal,Hae Won Park,Jenny Fu,Vasiliki Zygouras

doi:10.3389/frobt.2021.730992

Anastasia K Ostrowski, Cynthia Breazeal + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.730992

Copy DOI

Abstract

As voice-user interfaces (VUIs), such as smart speakers like Amazon Alexa or social robots like Jibo, enter multi-user environments like our homes, it is critical to understand how group members perceive and interact with these devices. VUIs engage socially with users, leveraging multi-modal cues including speech, graphics, expressive sounds, and movement. The combination of these cues can affect how users perceive and interact with these devices. Through a set of three elicitation studies, we explore family interactions (N = 34 families, 92 participants, ages 4–69) with three commercially available VUIs with varying levels of social embodiment. The motivation for these three studies began when researchers noticed that families interacted differently with three agents when familiarizing themselves with the agents and, therefore, we sought to further investigate this trend in three subsequent studies designed as a conceptional replication study. Each study included three activities to examine participants’ interactions with and perceptions of the three VUIS in each study, including an agent exploration activity, perceived personality activity, and user experience ranking activity. Consistent for each study, participants interacted significantly more with an agent with a higher degree of social embodiment, i.e., a social robot such as Jibo, and perceived the agent as more trustworthy, having higher emotional engagement, and having higher companionship. There were some nuances in interaction and perception with different brands and types of smart speakers, i.e., Google Home versus Amazon Echo, or Amazon Show versus Amazon Echo Spot between the studies. In the last study, a behavioral analysis was conducted to investigate interactions between family members and with the VUIs, revealing that participants interacted more with the social robot and interacted more with their family members around the interactions with the social robot. This paper explores these findings and elaborates upon how these findings can direct future VUI development for group settings, especially in familial settings.

Highlights

Technology is being developed to engage with us in seemingly more natural communicative ways resulting in users responding by interacting socially with devices such as voice user interfaces (VUIs) (Nass et al, 1994; Reeves and Nass, 1996)
In a series of three studies presented in this paper focused on social embodiment, we iterate upon the elicitation study speed dating format to provide insights into user interactions and perceptions of commercially available VUIs, the robustness of these results, and demonstrate how studies can be iterated upon and refined to support replicability of concepts
Our results demonstrate how families interact with and perceive agents’ personalities, trust, companionship, competence, and emotional engagement, increasingly as

Summary

Introduction

Technology is being developed to engage with us in seemingly more natural communicative ways resulting in users responding by interacting socially with devices such as voice user interfaces (VUIs) (Nass et al, 1994; Reeves and Nass, 1996) This has been a sustained interest for the human-robot interaction (HRI) community especially when applied to small groups and collaborative, multi-user spaces (Jung et al, 2017; Cambre and Kulkarni, 2019). We propose a speed dating scenario to mimic likely first encounters of families trying out different VUI agents together Such multi-agent format either mimics a situation where families or other small groups of people comparing voice agents such as in a retail scenario where potential users are buying voice agents, or a family trying out the new device together when it is delivered to their home. It provides a foundation for users to develop a mental model of the VUIs that researchers can leverage to understand users’ initial perceptions of these devices through additional measures and tools

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion