Hi, I'm Alisha Pradhan.
In this video, I'll share a bit about our work
on older adults using voice assistance.
Voice assistants such as Alexa and smart speakers
enable conversational non-visual interaction at home.
By providing a more natural means of interaction
than traditional computers, smartphones, or tablets,
these wise technologies are thought of as potentially more
approachable for some users.
Today I will briefly describe a study
we conducted to explore this potential specifically
for older adults who do not currently
use traditional computing devices regularly.
As such, we have the following research questions.
In this video, I'm going to briefly share a few findings
from the second research question around usage
of smart speakers by older adults who do not use
a computing device frequently.
Please have a look at our paper for more details.
Our participants included seven older adults,
65 years old or above.
All participants use digital technology infrequently,
that is, they use a smartphone, tablet, or computer less
than once a day.
We deployed Amazon encoder devices, a smart speaker
with the Alexa voice assistant in people's homes
and studied their usage over a period of three weeks using
usage logs from the Alexa app, the semi-structured interviews,
and daily diary entries.
Now moving to findings around usage.
Most frequently, participants use the voice assistant
for finding information, unstructured conversations,
or for playing music.
Now I'd like to share a bit more about two specific uses
by participants and its implications.
One of these is around the most frequent use
of finding information.
The other one wasn't used frequently
but is often a focus in research that has memory support
features such as reminders.
All participants valued the ability to ask Alexa questions
and find information online on a variety of topics including
health, famous personalities, history, local information, et
cetera.
But health information was the most frequent category
in information finding.
Participants asked questions about health conditions,
or specific medications, or even approaches
to manage day to day health conditions like foot pain.
What does this finding mean for CSCW?
As older adults appear to be using or interested in using
voice technologies for specific information, specifically
health information, we need to think about topics
such as credibility and trust.
Traditional graphical interfaces have contextual data
such as page layout or advertisement
that can help ascertain the information
credibility on the website.
But wise interfaces lack these.
Although some commercial assistance
reveal the source of information,
these might go unheard and is not
enough to address the issue of information credibility.
Some research directions to address this
include steering people towards better sources,
such as MedlinePlus instead of WebMD
or using web page features to assess information credibility
and give credibility scores which
can be returned to the user along with query result.
Now I'll talk about a second use.
In the interviews, participants described the idea of features
to support memory, such as reminders or alarms,
as appealing.
They describe using [?] reminders
could be helpful as they won't lose handwritten paper notes
or due to the dexterity required to write notes.
And yet, the actual usage of reminders and alarms
was low and even decreased with time.
Starting from the second week, we
learned that most participants did not find the reminders
or alarms reliable.
This concern about reliability included individuals forgetting
to set the reminder themselves.
Researchers have actively investigated reminder systems
for older adults using different forms of technologies.
In our study with smart speakers,
we see the scarce use of reminder and memory support
features showed that these wise reminder systems need
to be improved to be useful.
Future research could look at collaborative remembering
strategies where more than one person
is responsible for setting reminders and alarms.
And this idea was actually brought up
by one of our participants.
This aligns with the direction that
has evolved in case of shared family context.
Another approach could connect voice interfaces
with physical objects.
Example, a voice assistant could be triggered
when people start making notes on their physical calendar
and could act as a connected backup
to the physical calendar in which older adults are already
comfortable using and they trust.
So these are some of our findings from our TOCHI paper.
Please check out our paper for more.
Thank you.