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Understanding Circumstances for Desirable Proactive Behaviour of Voice Assistants: The Proactivity Dilemma

Published: 15 September 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The next major evolutionary stage for voice assistants will be their capability to initiate interactions by themselves. However, to design proactive interactions, it is crucial to understand whether and when this behaviour is considered useful and how desirable it is perceived for different social contexts or ongoing activities. To investigate people’s perspectives on proactivity and appropriate circumstances for it, we designed a set of storyboards depicting a variety of proactive actions in everyday situations and social settings and presented them to 15 participants in interactive interviews. Our findings suggest that, although many participants see benefits in agent proactivity, such as for urgent or critical issues, there are concerns about interference with social activities in multi-party settings, potential loss of agency, and intrusiveness. We discuss our implications for designing voice assistants with desirable proactive features.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
CUI '22: Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
July 2022
289 pages
ISBN:9781450397391
DOI:10.1145/3543829
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Published: 15 September 2022

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Author Tags

  1. Conversational Agents
  2. Proactive Agents
  3. Smart Home
  4. Smart Speakers
  5. Voice Assistants

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CUI 2022
CUI 2022: 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
July 26 - 28, 2022
Glasgow, United Kingdom

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CUI '22 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 33 submissions, 36%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 34 of 100 submissions, 34%

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  • (2024)Robot Design for Social IntervenabilityProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685392(1-9)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Caring for a companion as a form of self-care. Exploring the design space for irritating companion technologies for mental healthProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685343(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)TimelyTale: A Multimodal Dataset Approach to Assessing Passengers' Explanation Demands in Highly Automated VehiclesProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36785448:3(1-60)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
  • (2024)When to Approach the User: Investigating Suitable Context Factors for Proactive Voice Assistance in Automated CarsProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202410.1145/3670653.3670672(299-309)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Voice Assistants for Mental Health Services: Designing Dialogues with Homebound Older AdultsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661536(844-858)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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  • (2024)A Pilot Study on Multi-Party Conversation Strategies for Group RecommendationsProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665569(1-7)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
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