Speech interface reformulations and voice assistant personification preferences of children and parents

Abstract The pervasive availability of voice assistants may support children in finding answers to informational queries by removing the literacy requirements of text search (e.g., typing, spelling). However, most such systems are not designed for the specific needs and preferences of children and may struggle with understanding the intent of their questions. In our investigation, we observed 87 children and 27 adults interacting with three Wizard-of-Oz speech interfaces to arrive at answers to questions that required reformulation. We found that many children and some adults required help to reach an effective question reformulation. We report the common types of reformulations (both effective and ineffective ones) and the role of age in these. We also compared three versions of speech interfaces with different approaches to referring to itself (personification) and to the participant (naming personalization). We found that generally children preferred personified interfaces, but naming personalization was only preferred by younger children. We provide implications for design of speech systems for families.

[1]  Sharon L. Oviatt,et al.  Toward adaptive conversational interfaces: Modeling speech convergence with animated personas , 2004, TCHI.

[2]  Shrikanth S. Narayanan,et al.  Creating conversational interfaces for children , 2002, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process..

[3]  K. Poels,et al.  Older and Wiser? Facebook Use, Privacy Concern, and Privacy Protection in the Life Stages of Emerging, Young, and Middle Adulthood , 2015 .

[4]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Privacy and proportionality: adapting legal evaluation techniques to inform design in ubiquitous computing , 2005, CHI.

[5]  Peter G. Fairweather,et al.  Speech recognition, children, and reading , 1998, CHI Conference Summary.

[6]  Samer Al Moubayed,et al.  Exploring Children's Verbal and Acoustic Synchrony: Towards Promoting Engagement in Speech-Controlled Robot-Companion Games , 2015, INTERPERSONAL@ICMI.

[7]  Jill Fain Lehman,et al.  The Robot Who Knew Too Much: Toward Understanding the Privacy/Personalization Trade-Off in Child-Robot Conversation , 2016, IDC.

[8]  Andreas Nürnberger,et al.  What are the real differences of children's and adults' web search , 2011, SIGIR '11.

[9]  Elizabeth Foss,et al.  How children search the internet with keyword interfaces , 2009, IDC.

[10]  Paul Johns,et al.  Speech@home: an exploratory study , 2011, CHI EA '11.

[11]  Arjen P. de Vries,et al.  Supporting children's web search in school environments , 2012, IIiX.

[12]  Peta Wyeth,et al.  Design for inspiration: children, personal connections and educational technology , 2006, OZCHI '06.

[13]  Anne Marie Piper,et al.  "Siri, is this you?": Understanding young children's interactions with voice input systems , 2015, IDC.

[14]  Kori Inkpen Quinn,et al.  Yours, Mine and Ours? Sharing and Use of Technology in Domestic Environments , 2007, UbiComp.

[15]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Direct manipulation vs. interface agents , 1997, INTR.

[16]  Sebastian Möller,et al.  Communication failures in the speech-based control of smart home systems , 2007 .

[17]  Tad T. Brunyé,et al.  Mentally simulating narrative perspective is not universal or necessary for language comprehension. , 2016, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[18]  Blair MacIntyre,et al.  Eliza meets the wizard-of-oz: blending machine and human control of embodied characters , 2010, CHI.

[19]  Djoerd Hiemstra,et al.  An analysis of queries intended to search information for children , 2010, IIiX.

[20]  Bryan L. Pellom,et al.  Children's speech recognition with application to interactive books and tutors , 2003, 2003 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (IEEE Cat. No.03EX721).

[21]  Jill Fain Lehman,et al.  Turn-Taking, Children, and the Unpredictability of Fun , 2016, AI Mag..

[22]  Stuart MacFarlane,et al.  Using the fun toolkit and other survey methods to gather opinions in child computer interaction , 2006, IDC '06.

[23]  Sean Andrist,et al.  Managing chaos: models of turn-taking in character-multichild interactions , 2013, ICMI '13.

[24]  Dylan M. Jones,et al.  Talking to machines (abstract) , 1993, CHI '93.

[25]  Andreas Nürnberger,et al.  Search result visualization with characters for children , 2014, IDC.

[26]  James R. Glass,et al.  Spoken Content Retrieval—Beyond Cascading Speech Recognition with Text Retrieval , 2015, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[27]  Sherry Turkle,et al.  Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other , 2011 .

[28]  Maxine Wolfe,et al.  Childhood and Privacy , 1978 .

[29]  Rebecca Ferguson,et al.  Dimensions of personalisation in technology-enhanced learning: A framework and implications for design , 2018, Br. J. Educ. Technol..

[30]  Kiyohiro Shikano,et al.  Public speech-oriented guidance system with adult and child discrimination capability , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[31]  Rüdiger Hoffmann,et al.  Robustness optimization of a speech interface for child-directed embedded language tutoring , 2009, WOCCI '09.

[32]  Alexander I. Rudnicky,et al.  Leveraging Behavioral Patterns of Mobile Applications for Personalized Spoken Language Understanding , 2015, ICMI.

[33]  Colin Potts,et al.  Design of Everyday Things , 1988 .

[34]  Jodi Forlizzi,et al.  Receptionist or information kiosk: how do people talk with a robot? , 2010, CSCW '10.

[35]  Georgios N. Yannakakis,et al.  Fantasy, curiosity and challenge as adaptation indicators in multimodal dialogue systems for preschoolers , 2009, WOCCI.

[36]  Alexander I. Rudnicky,et al.  Ravenclaw: dialog management using hierarchical task decomposition and an expectation agenda , 2003, INTERSPEECH.

[37]  Daqing He,et al.  How do users respond to voice input errors?: lexical and phonetic query reformulation in voice search , 2013, SIGIR.

[38]  Chris Schmandt,et al.  Putting people first: specifying proper names in speech interfaces , 1994, UIST '94.

[39]  Vero Vanden Abeele,et al.  Measuring product liking in preschool children: An evaluation of the Smileyometer and This or That methods , 2013, Int. J. Child Comput. Interact..

[40]  Clifford Nass,et al.  Speech interfaces from an evolutionary perspective , 2000, CACM.

[41]  Jay G. Wilpon,et al.  A study of speech recognition for children and the elderly , 1996, 1996 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Conference Proceedings.

[42]  Alistair D. N. Edwards,et al.  Pilot experiments on children's voice recording , 2009, WOCCI '09.

[43]  Diego Giuliani,et al.  Investigating recognition of children's speech , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings. (ICASSP '03)..

[44]  Martin Ludvigsen,et al.  Mission from Mars: a method for exploring user requirements for children in a narrative space , 2005, IDC '05.

[45]  Shrikanth S. Narayanan,et al.  Robust recognition of children's speech , 2003, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process..

[46]  Elizabeth Foss,et al.  Children's roles using keyword search interfaces at home , 2010, CHI.

[47]  Yvonne Kammerer,et al.  Children's web search with Google: the effectiveness of natural language queries , 2012, IDC '12.

[48]  Anne Sullivan,et al.  Designing natural speech interactions for the living room , 2013, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[49]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Designing a virtual assistant for in-car child entertainment , 2015, IDC.

[50]  Kallirroi Georgila,et al.  Being Old Doesn’t Mean Acting Old: How Older Users Interact with Spoken Dialog Systems , 2009, TACC.

[51]  Abigail Sellen,et al.  "Like Having a Really Bad PA": The Gulf between User Expectation and Experience of Conversational Agents , 2016, CHI.

[52]  Kaisa Väänänen,et al.  User experience of proactive audio-based social devices: a wizard-of-oz study , 2014, MUM.

[53]  Djoerd Hiemstra,et al.  Analysis of Search and Browsing Behavior of Young Users on the Web , 2014, TWEB.

[54]  Carol Anne Wien,et al.  “Give Us a Privacy”: Play and Social Literacy in Young Children , 2005 .

[55]  Jack Mostow,et al.  Demonstration of a reading coach that listens , 1995, UIST '95.

[56]  Jessica K. Hodgins,et al.  Using Group History to Identify Character-Directed Utterances in Multi-Child Interactions , 2012, SIGDIAL Conference.

[57]  Luísa Coheur,et al.  ChatWoz: Chatting through a Wizard of Oz , 2015, ASSETS.

[58]  Alexander I. Rudnicky,et al.  Deploying speech interfaces to the masses , 2013, IUI '13 Companion.