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Are Current Voice Interfaces Designed to Support Children’s Language Development?

Published: 07 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, voice user interfaces (VUIs) capable of speech-based interaction are poised to support children’s language development by serving as their language partners. This paper reports an analytic evaluation of the currently available voice-based apps targeting young children to examine whether and how they incorporate evidence-based dialogue strategies that effectively support children’s learning. We found that, despite the fact that the current apps support a variety of language activities, most fail to carry out open-ended dialogue and provide extended back-and-forth opportunities, thus limiting their ability to encourage children’s language output and increase children’s language exposure. We discuss four design implications for developing VUIs that initiate dialogue and provide feedback in ways that better facilitate children’s language learning.

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Supplementary Materials (3411764.3445271_supplementalmaterials.zip)

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        May 2021
        10862 pages
        ISBN:9781450380966
        DOI:10.1145/3411764
        This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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        Published: 07 May 2021

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        1. Voice user interfaces
        2. language development
        3. scaffolding
        4. young children

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        • (2024)A Home Study of Parent-Child Co-Reading with a Bilingual Conversational AgentExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650836(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
        • (2024)Young Children's Creative Storytelling with ChatGPT vs. Parent: Comparing Interactive StylesExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650770(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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