Hello, I'm Inha Cha, a master's student in the department of industrial design at KAIST.
Today we're going to present our recent work exploring the use of a
voice-based conversational agent to empower adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.
A few years back, a mother of a 13-year-old son with autism reported that her son, Gus,
fell in love with Siri by expressing his emotions and searching for information
related to his specific interest. We consider that people with autism have characteristics such as
obsessed with particular interests, repetitive behaviors, and difficulties in social interaction.
Inspired by this story, we set out to explore how the VCAs could serve as an empowering
accessibility technology for autistic adolescents in navigating their daily lives and personal
characteristics. We choose a participatory design approach by actively involving adolescents with
autism as design partners. We investigated the lived experience of using VCAs in-depth.
During the two-week study, the participant navigated various aspects of VCAs in their
daily lives and shared their experiences with researchers in the workshops.
The first workshop was to allow participants clearly to understand
VCA functions and plan how to use them through multiple discussions with researchers.
The second workshop was to let them develop their own strategies for using certain functions of
VCAs to fit their own context. The last workshop was to make them discuss their
expectations towards VCAs based on their experience. Our scaffolded an activity-based
approach enabled participants to identify VCA's rules by themselves
and develop their own strategies for using and appropriating its functions.
We found five opportunities and possibilities of VCAs in artistic adolescence their lives. VCAs
can help autistic adolescents think about which part of themselves they want to improve upon like
promoting self-care skills, regulating negative emotions, and practicing conversation skills.
Here, we introduce a couple of these in detail. Like the Gus example in the introduction,
one of our participants soothed his stressful emotions and figured out how to express his
feelings by conversing with the agent. Like him, other participants also wanted to share their
personal stories with VCAs they said it is because the VCA is a machine with human-like features
such as giving supportive words, honorable conversational attitude, and calm voice tone.
Using VCAs allowed our participants to improve on their inaccurate pronunciation For example,
during the first three days, Tom repeatedly has difficulty activating the agent because
of his pronunciation even if he tried many times. However, after much practice throughout the study,
he thought his pronunciation got better enough to activate the agent right away. Interestingly, the
participant took advantage of "Fortune-telling" functions and accepted general advice on attitude
or motivational messages from VCAs. Adolescents with autism often have emotional conflicts with
their caregivers or therapists, which makes their communication difficulties. We found VCAs
could provide advice on behalf of caregivers or therapists, reducing their burden and conflict.
So, our findings suggest that VCAs could be engaging, empowering, and emancipating tools
that support autistic adolescents by addressing their needs, personalities, and expectations
Unlike many prior works, VCAs can actually promote
self-expressions and self-empowerment rather than accommodate the technology
Finally, we propose design implications to promote positive experiences using VCAs in the
daily lives of autistic adolescents. Our design implications include providing initial moments and
scaffolded approaches to developing strategies for using VCAs, personalizing conversational styles
and experiences, and designing system guidance to handle improper user requests or behaviors.
Thank you for listening. I would be glad to try and answer any questions.