Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life

Porcheron, Martin; Fischer, Joel E.; Reeves, Stuart; Sharples, Sarah

Abstract

© 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). 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.

Citation

Porcheron, M., Fischer, J. E., Reeves, S., & Sharples, S. (2018). Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life. In CHI '18: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (1-12). https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174214

• Conference Name: CHI '18: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Conference Location: Montreal QC Canada
• Start Date: Apr 21, 2018
• End Date: Apr 26, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Dec 20, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Apr 21, 2018
• Publication Date: Apr 21, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jan 18, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 21, 2018
• Journal: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18)
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2018-April
• Pages: 1-12
• Book Title: CHI '18: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 978-1-4503-5620-6
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174214
• Keywords: Amazon Echo; conversational agent; conversational user interface; conversation analysis; intelligent personal assistants; ethnomethodology; collocated interaction
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/927340
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3173574.3174214
• Related Public URLs: https://chi2018.acm.org/
• Additional Information: Paper No.: 640