hi my name is Radhika Garg and i'm going to present paper titled the
last decade of HCI research on children and voice based conversational agents
that my collaborators and i worked on last year
In this paper we contribute an understanding of the current state of HCI research on children
and voice-based CAs and the areas that should be addressed in the future studies.
We searched and screened papers in february 2020 from ACM DL, Proquest and scopus
ultimately 38 papers from core HCI venues published between 2011 and 2020 were reviewed.
We excluded papers focusing on robots due to potential confounding factors such as physical
movement and non-verbal expressions. I next elaborate on some of our findings
12 of the reviewed papers use quantitative methods such as setting up experimental design
or developed quantitative models including machine learning models or regression models using some
form of corpus such as stories stored by children or logs of child interactions with the system.
Our review showed that current research is heavily skewed towards western-based views,
cultural norms, and communicative practices as most of the studies were conducted with
participants who identify and live within western culture.
Seven main research themes were present in the 38 reviewed papers.
Thee papers explored how children ascribed human-like qualities to CA.
How conversational agents could support children's learning such as learning
through question answering, language learning, science or math learning. One paper also was
design methods paper in this category. Other papers were around use and role of CAs in home
and in family context. How conversational agent could support children's play or storytelling.
Three papers also explored the issues around information collected and revealed by CAs,
and five papers worked with children with differing ability to see how CAs
could support them there were two papers that didn't fell into any of these themes.
Hence we labeled them as miscellaneous based on the insights gathered during a
review we suggest seven key possible future directions for HCI research in this context.
in this presentation i'm going to talk about four of the key takeaways or future directions
for hci research in this context. The first one is diversifying participants for culturally
sensitive CAs except for a few studies that specifically targeted diverse families
based on race and socioeconomic status a review found that CAs are often studied designed
or developed only with samples of children who have typically have infrastructure
support are familiar with technology and or belong to specific sections of society.
furthermore only a small number of studies have taken into account aspects of children's
intersectional identity while designing or trying to understand their interaction with CAs.
Future avenues of research should focus on a wider range of linguistic capabilities and backgrounds
to ensure that a broad range of children voice is heard in ca design process.
Further engaging with more culturally diverse participants in children-based
CA design would enable researchers to develop a deeper and broader understanding
of see how CAs can be culturally tailored from a children's perspective. In this way CAs can
become aligned with the values and ideas that diverse children draw upon in their development
Second we encourage researchers to further engage with theory in our review 14 papers engage with
theories or theory-based concepts to hypothesize to design a study or artifact or to analyze data.
While scholars can continue engaging with literature from across disciplines
such as education, speech language pathology, and children's social and communication development
they may also consider theoretical approaches emerging from spoken interactions with CAs
that of adults. For example, scholars can explore how children's partners model
evolve with age and how it influences their interactions with and perceptions of CAs.
Another key aspect that we found across the literature was the notion of multi-party
interactions specifically involving children. The HCI literature highlights the multi-party nature
of CA technologies as they become embedded within home environments and the topic of
multi-party ca interactions with children appears in study of the use and role of cas in home and
family context. However this set of work adopts a somewhat broad focus on interactions with cas.
We saw the need also to consider a specific interactional sequence and to inquire into
how to avoid conflicts between users. Though design scholars have indicated the importance of
scaffolding their conversational turns to ensure fairness and avoid conflicts between users when
case are used in collaborative gaming this raises important considerations for designers and make
the case for deeper understanding for how to equip such systems to respond to interactional dynamics
through their design. For example, researchers may want to explore how power dynamics between
parents and children intersect with CAs and how CAs enable such dynamics to play out or not.
Next we recommend scholars to consider developmental stages and complex
communication needs of children. children's social cognitive and communicative skills
change as they grow from infancy to adolescence. For example
younger children tend to have shorter attention spans than older children. Our review suggests
that relatively few CA research papers target infant and toddlers and older adults.
While limited research on infants and toddlers could be attributed to limited conversational
capacity of children in these groups, there is nevertheless a need for the community to engage
more widely across the age spectrum, particularly with older teens. Researchers also need to focus
more explicitly on the diversity of children's needs. Our review shows a clear gap in this area.
Only two of the reviewed papers explore children with complex communication needs such as those
with language impairments, with a further three papers examining interactions with CAs
for children with autism these papers exemplify the importance of understanding ca interactions
with children having different abilities and therefore have specific needs and requirements
and of designing appropriate interaction with their needs. While work in this area
can be built on adult-based CA research by looking at adults with diverse capacity,
such as non-sighted individuals people with stammer, this could only serve as a starting
point and cannot be assumed that interaction with children might be the same as that with adults
our review also revealed a lack of design based research in the area of children's interaction
with cas only five studies focused on this topic engaging with children in design through methods
such as cooperative inquiry and co-design while most of these design works included parents
in design sessions there is a need to include other relevant stakeholders based on the context
under consideration such as teachers for learning domain therapists for the context of mental health
furthermore rather than on practical wide range outcomes these paper tended to focus on design
recommendations and implications specific to the situation being researched limiting
their application to wider design practices in keeping with previous speech-based reviews in hci
more widely applicable design-based insights are needed to support the design of cas for children
this could include the development of robust heuristics to support the design process which
are useful for facilitating the design and evaluation of products.
thank you for listening