Hi, I'm presenting the paper “Designers characterized naturalness
in voice user interfaces: Their goals, Practices and Challenges authored by Yelim Kim,
That's me, Mohi Reza, Joanna McGrenere, and Dongwook Yoon from the University of British Columbia.
Voice User Interfaces or VUIs
for short, are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives through various everyday gadgets
like smart phones and smart speakers. Along with that users' demand
for a more natural conversation experience with voice agents has been increasing. For example,
the VP of Alexa Devices at Amazon said “Consumers really want to
speak in a natural way with Alexa.” Voice designers,
who are in charge of architecting the conversational experience between users
and voice agents, have tried to meet the users' need for more natural conversation experience.
But this has not been easy.
For example, in a popular press article, a voice designer with
over 17 years of experience called out the
need for enhanced support for natural language. Noting that "The current tools do not come with any underlying knowledge of language, meaning
or inter-relationships between words
and concepts." While designers' challenges have surfaced in popular press articles,
there has been no systematic investigation into how designers pursue creating a natural VUI
and the challenges that they face.
Hence, we raised the following research questions:
(1) How do VUI designers approach naturalness in their design practices?
How do they align such practices to their varying design goals?
(2) How do they align such practices to their varying design goals?
and (3) What challenges do they face in striving to offer natural conversational experiences? To find the answers
for these questions,
we conducted interviews with 20 voice designers with diverse backgrounds, including gender amateur designers to professional ones from small to large companies working on a
a variety of different types of systems. Our study found 12 ways voice designers
characterize naturalness. Through thematic analysis,
we classified them into three categories, which are 'Social', 'Transactional',
and 'Core'. For this presentation,
I will highlight the first two categories
and some selected characteristics next.
Social characteristics are those promoting social conversation
for harmonious and positive human-agent interactions. One social characteristic is to provide
sympathetic responses to users’ sentiments to maintain harmonious interactions
and not to break the natural flow of the conversation.
For example, P2 said if he knows his users’ favorite team won, he
will make his voice agent have a happy voice
and vice versa. The 'Transactional' category includes characteristics that are relevant to users
accomplishing their tasks. One example of a transactional characteristic is to proactively help
users through a conversation. P12 said a natural VUI should detect
or even ask for the things that the users needs just as how people can actively suggest what others might need beyond
passively carrying out a given request.
Our designers also described their challenges in creating a natural VUI.
We found that the challenges they reported can be mapped onto the
two of the three categories of characteristics
we introduced earlier, namely social, and core. In our paper,
We present 7 challenges belonging to these two categories. In this presentation, we will
introduce the two most interesting challenges in the Social category.
Our designers found it difficult to augment task-oriented applications
with social conversations. Friendly,
and human-like conversations tend to be long
and interactive. This conflicts with the goal of task-oriented applications to get things done fast
and efficiently. SSML is a tool
for controlling prosodic elements
such as voice pitch and pause. SSML only affords editing individual prosodic element separately.
This is time-consuming and does not produce the desired prosody
for conveying a nuanced meaning. We discuss our findings on VUI naturalness
and their implications for better VUI design tools. Our study revealed that VUI
naturalness is context-dependent.
For example, in some situation answering users' requests with high speed
and accuracy rather than having a social chi-chat is more desired
and considered to be natural. Our study also found VUI designers need more intuitive tools
for editing voice prosody than SSML.
We provide our design idea which was inspired by how VUI designers work with
voice actors to create natural sounding dialogue. To conclude, our study brought
focus on VUI designers who were underrepresented
as the subject of study.
We provide insights on their practices
and challenges in creating natural VUIs. Our work provides the foundation
for implementing helpful voice design tools, guidelines and benchmarks.
Thank you for watching!