Hello my name is Erin Beneteau. I'm here today to tell you about our paper
Assumptions Checked: How Families Learn About and Use
the Echo Dot. My co-authors and I were really
fortunate to work on a grant funded by Mozilla, in which we
provided 10 Echo Dots to 10 diverse families,
none of whom had ever owned a dedicated home voice assistant before.
We began our study by conducting initial interviews in which we
interviewed family members about their expectations of how they might use the
Echo Dot. Then we observed families unbox and
conduct the initial setup of the Echo Dot in their home.
And at this point we already started to see an assumption mismatch between the
design of the Echo Dot and expectations of use through initial
setup. For example, when some families first
plugged in the Echo Dot they began immediately to talk to it and
say things like, Alexa play music. And when the Echo Dot didn't respond,
then families started wondering what was wrong with the device.
It wasn't until later that families discovered that, in fact, they had to
complete setup through an app. And in fact many of our families were
quite surprised to learn that they needed to conduct the setup through an app.
After that initial setup we conducted one month of anchored audio
sampling in which we recorded conversations between family members
and the Echo Dot for a period of four weeks.
At the conclusion of those four weeks we
conducted exit interviews with families to learn about their feelings about how
the Echo Dot worked.
In total we captured 14 and a half hours of audio capture.
And we went through and coded those audio captures,
looking at the different functionality that families used throughout that four weeks.
And one thing we noticed is that over
the period of four weeks families decreased the number of
functions that they used within the Echo Dot.
And in exit interviews families talked about this, such as with Family F, that said:
"and I honestly thought we would do more
maybe also because we don't know what skills it has...
you use what you learn." Family F also talked about how, "I wish that the makers
would not assume that their consumers are as high tech or
half the level that they're at." So again, we start seeing how this
assumption mismatch between the design of the device and families' assumptions
of how the device might work can impact overall learning and use of
the functionality of the Echo Dot.
Let's take music as an example.
Family D said, "it took me a little while to like realize
that I didn't just have to use Amazon Music... it wasn't until after a while that
I figured out I can actually connect her to other music services like Spotify
and Pandora." In fact we had two families that went
through the four week deployment without realizing that their Amazon Echo
Dot could connect to their existing Spotify services.
And in fact at the exit interviews those families talked about
how they preferred Spotify's music system so they played music
on their phone, tablet, or computer instead of through the Echo Dot.
So this led us to thinking about Roger's Diffusion of Innovation Theory,
and how people learn about innovations and new technology and new functionality.
And based on this innovation theory- Diffusion of Innovation Theory
we developed a set of technology learning
circles of influence to describe how receptive people are
to learning about functionality of technology through voice interfaces
and about voice interfaces. So for this talk, because it's quite short,
let's take a look at the inner circle here
in which the user learns about functionality through the voice interface
and the voice interface learns about functionality and preferences
from the user.
So here's an actual section of audio capture from Family H,
in which the child asks Alexa to play a specific music piece.
Alexa's response is: "Havana isn't included in Prime but
is available in Amazon Music Unlimited. Would you like to learn more?"
In this case both the child and parent say, no they do not want to learn more.
Alexa does not honor that request though, and says "okay you can sign up any time
by saying sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited," and then provides a sample of the music.
So by not honoring the user's requests-
that, no they don't want to learn more,
the response is not instilling trust between the user and the voice interface-
that the voice interface is going to honor the user, the human user's, requests.
So we focus on how can you create a trusted learning partner
through a voice interface.
Family B asked a very similar question, they said:
"How do we learn what Alexa can do without Alexa looking like they're
trying to push marketing stuff on us?" Using our circles of influence model,
this is how we suggest that you can create a trusted
learning partner to promote learning and trust between
the voice interface and the human users.
So when the child
asks for a specific song to be played we suggest that Alexa could
provide options by saying, "I can't find that song within the default music
program but it might be available via Pandora,
Amazon Music Services, or Spotify. Would you like to set up one of those
music services now?" If the human says "no" then the machine,
the voice interface, should honor that response
and say "okay" and just stop talking.
Speaking of stopping talking- I am at my time limit. So if you want to
talk more about conversational design, learning, voice interfaces, and HCI, please
feel free to email me at ebenet@uw.edu. Thank you.