Hi, welcome to my talk. My name is Sarah Theres Völkel and I’m going to present our paper on
eliciting and analysing users’ envisioned dialogues with perfect voice assistants.
I am presenting on behalf of our great research team, which you can see here..
Voice assistants have become ubiquitous and related work shows that they are perceived
as particularly appealing if adapted to user preferences and personality.
However, commercially available voice assistants have so far taken a one-size-fits-all approach,
ignoring the potential benefits of adaptation. Furthermore, related work has emphasised that
users perceive many shortcomings in current voice assistant interaction
This motivates us to ask users themselves how they envision dialogues with a perfect voice assistant
and to analyse how this vision varies among users.
In an online survey, we asked 205 participants to write a conversation between a user and a
perfect voice assistant, assuming there were no technical limitations to its capabilities.
We presented participants with different smart home scenarios
in which a user solves a specific issue by conversing with the voice assistant
In the instructions, we also highlighted that the conversation could be initiated by both parties
We designed eight scenarios based on the most popular smart speaker use cases
as recently identified in related work
In addition, we included an open scenario where participants could describe a situation
in which they would like to use the perfect voice assistant.
At the end of the study, we also collected participants’ self-reported personality
We elicited 1,835 dialogues with a total number of more than 80,000 words and 9,200 speaker lines.
On average, the voice assistant had a bigger share of speech than the user
but similar speaker turns and number of questions The majority of dialogues were initiated by
the user, whilst the voice assistant terminated the dialogues more often
Our results show that people’s envisioned dialogues comprise longer speech acts and
more interactivity than current dialogues with voice assistants
Furthermore, we conducted an inductive thematic analysis on the emerging dialogues
We identified 15 themes which we describe in detail in our paper
but I will now present some of the main findings.
So, what or who is the perfect voice assistant?
Almost all participants envisioned a voice assistant which gives well thought-through
suggestions and recommendations to solve more or less complex problems.
The perfect assistant is also foresighted and proactive,
anticipating and proposing possible next steps to the user without the user asking for them,
such as turning on the heating because it’s cold.
However, users in the dialogues do not always accept their assistant’s suggestions,
indicating that users might wish for a more collaborative conversation with voice assistants.
Furthermore, the majority of participants equipped the voice assistant with personal
knowledge about the user and the environment. This kind of knowledge makes conversations
with assistants more effective and natural by creating the impression
of shared knowledge and common ground, as integral to human dialogue effectiveness.
In contrast, our findings point to a mixed picture regarding other dialogue characteristics.
Only 39% designed a voice assistant which expresses its own opinions.
We calculated generalised linear mixed models and found out that user conscientiousness
is a negative predictor for the assistant offering an opinion. That is,
conscientious users are more likely that they do not want the voice assistant to give an opinion.
Half of the participants did also not equip their perfect assistant with any sense of humour
although they were given the task to entertain their friends in one of our scenarios.
Our analyses suggest that particularly neurotic
users tend to oppose the use of humour in voice assistants
In the open scenario at the end of the survey, people imagined different
roles for the voice assistant. 27% described purely functional dialogues,
suggesting that the assistant is seen rather as a tool to get things done.
However, the majority of dialogues depicts a helpful assistant who supports the users
in their chores and might take over more complex tasks in the future,
such as meal planning or mental health support. Echoing previous findings, few participants
really regarded the voice assistant as sort of a friend. However, the scenarios participants
described reveal use cases in which the assistant also listens to and advises on personal issues.
Summing up, you should read our paper if you are interested in how to design
voice assistant dialogues. In particular, we found out
that most users envision dialogues with a perfect voice assistant that are highly
interactive and not purely functional. Furthermore, our results suggest how this
vision of a perfect voice assistant varies between different users
and thus how the voice assistant personality may be adapted to users.
Thank you very much for watching our video. You may also find all
our collected data free for use on our website.