research-article

Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life

Authors:

Martin Porcheron,

Joel E. Fischer,

Sarah SharplesAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Paper No.: 640, Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174214

Published: 21 April 2018 Publication History

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.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (pn4837.mp4)

Download
242.12 MB

References

[1]

J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage. 1984. Transcript Notation. In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge University Press, ix--xvi.

[2]

Liam Bannon, John Bowers, Peter Carstensen, John A. Hughes, Kari Kuutii, James Pycock, Tom Rodden, Kjeld Schmidt, Dan Shapiro, Wes Sharrock, and Stephen Viller. 1993. Informing CSCW System Requirements. In COMIC Deliverable 2.1.

[3]

Graham Button, Jeff Coulter, John R. E. Lee, and Wes Sharrock. 1995. Computers, Minds and Conduct. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.

Digital Library

[4]

Andy Crabtree, Steve Benford, Chris Greenhalgh, Paul Tennent, Matthew Chalmers, and Barry Brown. 2006. Supporting Ethnographic Studies of Ubiquitous Computing in the Wild. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '06), 60.

Digital Library

[5]

David DeVault, Ron Artstein, Grace Benn, Teresa Dey, Ed Fast, Alesia Gainer, Kallirroi Georgila, Jon Gratch, Arno Hartholt, Margaux Lhommet, Gale Lucas, Stacy Marsella, Fabrizio Morbini, Angela Nazarian, Stefan Scherer, Giota Stratou, Apar Suri, David Traum, Rachel Wood, Yuyu Xu, Albert Rizzo, and Louisphilippe Morency. 2014. SimSensei Kiosk: A Virtual Human Interviewer for Healthcare Decision Support. International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 1: 1061--1068.

Digital Library

[6]

Paul Dourish and Graham Button. 1998. On "Technomethodology": Foundational Relationships Between Ethnomethodology and System Design. Human-Computer Interaction 13, 4: 395--432.

Digital Library

[7]

Hasan Shahid Ferdous, Frank Vetere, Hilary Davis, Bernd Ploderer, and Kenton OHara. 2016. Technologies At Mealtime: Collocated Interactions In The Family Home. In CHI '16 Workshop on Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions.

[8]

Harold Garfinkel. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall.

[9]

Nigel Gilbert, Robin Wooffitt, and Norman Fraser. 1990. Organising Computer Talk. In Computers and Conversation (1st edition), Paul Luff, David Frohlich and Nigel Gilbert (eds.). Academic Press, 235 -- 257.

[10]

Charles Goodwin and John Heritage. 1990. Conversation Analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology 19, 1: 283--307.

[11]

Christian Heath, Jon Hindmarsh, and Paul Luff. 2010. Video in Qualitative Research. SAGE.

[12]

Jiepu Jiang, Wei Jeng, and Daqing He. 2013. How Do Users Respond to Voice Input Errors?: Lexical and Phonetic Query Reformulation in Voice Search. In Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '13), 143--152.

Digital Library

[13]

Mohammed Waleed Kadous and Claude Sammut. 2004. InCa: A Mobile Conversational Agent. PRICAI 2004: Trends in Artificial Intelligence 3157: 644--653.

[14]

Stefan Kopp, Lars Gesellensetter, Nicole C. Krämer, and Ipke Wachsmuth. 2005. A Conversational Agent as Museum Guide -- Design and Evaluation of a RealWorld Application. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 329--343.

Digital Library

[15]

Stephen C. Levinson. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.

[16]

J. C. R. Licklider. 1960. Man-Computer Symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1, 1: 4--11.

[17]

Ewa Luger and Abigail Sellen. 2016. "Like Having a Really Bad PA": The Gulf between User Expectation and Experience of Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), 5286--5297.

Digital Library

[18]

Moira McGregor and John Tang. 2017. More to Meetings: Challenges in Using Speech-Based Technology to Support Meetings. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '17).

Digital Library

[19]

Michael McTear. 2002. Spoken Dialogue Technology: Enabling the Conversational User Interface. ACM Computing Surveys 34, 1: 90--169.

Digital Library

[20]

Michael McTear, Zoraida Callejas, and David Griol. 2016. The Conversational Interface. Springer International Publishing.

[21]

Dong Nguyen, A. Seza Doğruöz, Carolyn P. Rosé, and Franciska de Jong. 2016. Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey. Computational Linguistics 42, 3: 537--593.

Digital Library

[22]

Kenton O'Hara, Richard Harper, Helena Mentis, Abigail Sellen, and Alex Taylor. 2013. On the Naturalness of Touchless: Putting the "Interaction" Back into NUI. ACM Transactions on ComputerHuman Interaction 20, 1: 1--25.

Digital Library

[23]

Sabine Payr. 2013. Virtual butlers and real people: styles and practices in long-term use of a companion. In Your Virtual Butler, Robert Trappl (ed.). SpringerVerlag Berlin, Heidelberg, 134--178.

Digital Library

[24]

Hannah R. M. Pelikan and Mathias Broth. 2016. Why That Nao?: How Humans Adapt to a Conventional Humanoid Robot in Taking Turns-at-Talk. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), 4921--4932.

Digital Library

[25]

Stefania Pizza, Barry Brown, Donald McMillan, and Airi Lampinen. 2016. Smartwatch in vivo. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), 5456--5469.

Digital Library

[26]

Martin Porcheron, Joel E. Fischer, Moira McGregor, Barry Brown, Ewa Luger, Heloisa Candello, and Kenton O'Hara. 2017. Talking with Conversational Agents in Collaborative Action. In Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17 Companion), 431--436.

Digital Library

[27]

Martin Porcheron, Joel E. Fischer, and Sarah Sharples. 2017. "Do Animals Have Accents?": Talking with Agents in Multi-Party Conversation. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '17).

Digital Library

[28]

Stuart Reeves and Barry Brown. 2016. Embeddedness and Sequentiality in Social Media. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16), 1050--1062.

Digital Library

[29]

Jacob M. Rigby, Duncan P. Brumby, Sandy J. J. Gould, and Anna L Cox. 2017. Media Multitasking at Home. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video (TVX '17), 3--10.

Digital Library

[30]

Sean Rintel, Richard Harper, and Kenton O'Hara. 2016. The Tyranny of the Everyday in Mobile Video Messaging. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 47814792.

Digital Library

[31]

John Rooksby, Timothy E. Smith, Alistair Morrison, Mattias Rost, and Matthew Chalmers. 2015. Configuring Attention in the Multiscreen Living Room. In Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW '15), 243--261.

[32]

Harvey Sacks. 1992. Harvey Sacks: Lectures on Conversation. Basil Publishing, Oxford.

[33]

Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation. Language 50, 4: 696--735.

[34]

Emanuel A. Schegloff. 1987. Analyzing Single Episodes of Interaction: An Exercise in Conversation Analysis. Social Psychology Quarterly 50, 2: 101--114.

[35]

Emanuel A. Schegloff. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

[36]

Tanya Stivers, N. J. Enfield, Penelope Brown, Christina Englert, Makoto Hayashi, Trine Heinemann, Gertie Hoymann, Federico Rossano, Jan Peter de Ruiter, Kyung-Eun Yoon, and Stephen C Levinson. 2009. Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, 26: 10587--92.

[37]

Peter Tolmie and Andy Crabtree. 2008. Deploying Research Technology in the Home. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '08), 639--648.

Digital Library

[38]

Peter Tolmie, Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden, and Steve Benford. 2008. "Are You Watching This Film or What?" Interruption and the Juggling of Cohorts. In Proceedings of the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '08), 257.

Digital Library

[39]

Sherry Turkle. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

Digital Library

[40]

Laura Pfeifer Vardoulakis, Lazlo Ring, Barbara Barry, Candace L. Sidner, and Timothy Bickmore. 2012. Designing Relational Agents as Long Term Social Companions for Older Adults. In Intelligent Virtual Agents. 289--302.

[41]

Robin Wooffitt. 1994. Applying Sociology: Conversation Analysis in the Study of Human(Simulated) Computer Interaction. Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique 43, 1: 7--33.

[42]

Victor Zue, Stephanie Seneff, J. R. Glass, Joseph Polifroni, Christine Pao, T. J. Hazen, and Lee Hetherington. 2000. JUPlTER: a telephone-based conversational interface for weather information. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing 8, 1: 85--96.

Cited By

Nacimiento-García EDíaz-Kaas-Nielsen HGonzález-González C(2024)Gender and Accent Biases in AI-Based Tools for Spanish: A Comparative Study between Alexa and WhisperApplied Sciences10.3390/app1411473414:11(4734)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14114734
Addlesee AEshghi A(2024)You have interrupted me again!: making voice assistants more dementia-friendly with incremental clarificationFrontiers in Dementia10.3389/frdem.2024.13430523Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/frdem.2024.1343052
Fester-Seeger M(2024)How a Child Learns to ‘Talk’ to a Smart Speaker: On the Emergence of Enlanguaged PracticesLinguistic Frontiers10.2478/lf-2024-00107:1(1-22)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.2478/lf-2024-0010
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing

Recommendations

"Do Animals Have Accents?": Talking with Agents in Multi-Party Conversation
CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

In this paper we unpack the use of conversational agents, or so-called intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), in multi-party conversation amongst a group of friends while they are socialising in a café. IPAs such as Siri or Google Now can be found on a ...
KinVoices: Using Voices of Friends and Family in Voice Interfaces
CSCW2

With voice user interfaces (VUIs) becoming ubiquitous and speech synthesis technology maturing, it is possible to synthesise voices to resemble our friends and relatives (which we will collectively call 'kin') and use them on VUIs. However, designing ...
Conversational User Interfaces in Smart Homecare Interactions: A Conversation Analytic Case Study
CUI '23: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces

Policymakers are increasingly interested in using virtual assistants to augment social care services in the context of a demographic ageing crisis. At the same time, technology companies are marketing conversational user interfaces (CUIs) and smart home ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2018

8489 pages

ISBN:9781450356206

DOI:10.1145/3173574

General Chairs:
Regan Mandryk
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
,
Mark Hancock
University of Waterloo, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Mark Perry
Brunel University London, UK
,
Anna Cox
University College London, UK

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 April 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Badges

Best Paper

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

EPSRC

Conference

CHI '18

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '18: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 21 - 26, 2018

Montreal QC, Canada

Acceptance Rates

CHI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 666 of 2,590 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

439
Total Citations
View Citations
6,949
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)659
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)93

Reflects downloads up to 15 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Nacimiento-García EDíaz-Kaas-Nielsen HGonzález-González C(2024)Gender and Accent Biases in AI-Based Tools for Spanish: A Comparative Study between Alexa and WhisperApplied Sciences10.3390/app1411473414:11(4734)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14114734
Addlesee AEshghi A(2024)You have interrupted me again!: making voice assistants more dementia-friendly with incremental clarificationFrontiers in Dementia10.3389/frdem.2024.13430523Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/frdem.2024.1343052
Fester-Seeger M(2024)How a Child Learns to ‘Talk’ to a Smart Speaker: On the Emergence of Enlanguaged PracticesLinguistic Frontiers10.2478/lf-2024-00107:1(1-22)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.2478/lf-2024-0010
Leblebici D(2024)“You are Apple, why are you speaking to me in Turkish?”: the role of English in voice assistant interactionsMultilingua10.1515/multi-2023-007243:4(455-485)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2023-0072
Yuan YWu CNiu JMao L(2024)The Effects of Human-Robot Interactions and the Human-Robot Relationship on Robot Competence, Trust, and AcceptanceSage Open10.1177/2158244024124823014:2Online publication date: 17-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241248230
Liesenfeld ADingemanse M(2024)Interactive probes: Towards action-level evaluation for dialogue systemsDiscourse & Communication10.1177/17504813241267071Online publication date: 12-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241267071
Reineke SHelmer H(2024)User practices in dealing with trouble in interactions with virtual assistants in German: Repeating, altering and insistingDiscourse & Communication10.1177/175048132411271494Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/175048132411271494
Sogemeier DForster YNaujoks FKrems JKeinath A(2024)The Importance of Timing—An Expert Evaluation on Latencies for Voice AssistantsProceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting10.1177/10711813241260290Online publication date: 10-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/10711813241260290
Seaborn KSawa YWatanabe M(2024)Coimagining the Future of Voice Assistants with Cultural SensitivityHuman Behavior and Emerging Technologies10.1155/2024/32387372024(1-21)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1155/2024/3238737
Schulz AYoussef YBeruscha FHornecker E(2024)User Perceptions and Experiences with Smart Homes - The Smart Home as an Obedient Guard Dog, Disinterested Cat, Ambitious Octopus or Busy BeehiveProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202410.1145/3670653.3670659(171-183)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3670653.3670659
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents