Hello and welcome to this presentation about Whispering Voice Assistants.
My name is Emmi Parviainen and together with
Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard we present a Research through
Design project that explores how whispering influences the ways people experience and also
interact with voice assistants.
In this paper we present how whispering opens up new dimensions
of how and when voice interaction could be used. We propose that designers of whispering
voice assistants should reflect on how they facilitate the experiential qualities of creepiness,
trust, and also intimacy, and reflect on the potential challenges that whispering brings to the relation
between a user and a voice assistant.
Today, it feels sort of like machines have overpopulated
the world with sounds.
At the same time in at least here in Western societies, volume has been considered as power
and people have been showing importance and authority by raising their voice. However,
whispering, even though it is weak in volume, is used to communicate various moods, feelings
and contexts in human- human interaction, probably more than any other voice modality,
and, therefore, we think that it challenges the assumption that ’volume really is power’.
In late 2018, Amazon introduced a new way to interact with Alexa: a whisper mode.
When a user whispers to Alexa, Alexa will whisper back.
This allows a user to interact with a voice assistant in contexts where speaking with
full volume would not be ideal e.g. when there is a sleeping baby in the same room.
Despite Amazon highlighting the useful property of whispering,
users of Alexa began to label the behavior as quite "creepy".
One reason being that whispering pushes against
the traditional social norms of a machine-like voice assistant.
Something like whispering is very human-like. It's not something that machines should know how to do.
If you have not heard how a whispering Alexa sounds like (and now you wonder)
Let me just play you a little clip.
So, since there are no previous research done about whispering voice assistants
we wanted to explore this topic and we carried out a Research through Design project.
So here we used design fiction methods, such as a co-speculation workshop,
a design probe and also a production of a short film.
These were to inquire the future opportunities but also
the challenges of using whispering as a voice modality in voice assistants.
Through this design project we came to understand a series of dimensions and experiential qualities of
that can be used analytically used to better understand the shifting social norms of voice assistants,
and to design new experiences of whispering voice assistants.
These dimensions of whispering (like we like to call them) propose new possibilities
of what, how and where people can interact with their voice
These knowledge contributions are not meant to be viewed as universal guidelines
for the design of voice assistant but more of a suggestions for further research and also speculation.
So the design fiction filmt hat we have illustrates the daily life of a protagonist
Andrea and how she uses whispering to interact with her voice assistant called One.
The first scene we have explores how whispering could be used to maintain a calm environment at home
For example, one of our participants expressed how he would think it would be more pleasant to wake up
if the assistant would whisper to him
This kind of a calm state would be more preferred than Alexa using a more "vocalized" sound.
One participant also felt like it would be convenient if they could reflect on emotions and experiences through whispering
The same participant also illustrated a scenario where she could be using this kind of voice assistant
in public places like crowded busses or subways.
To relieve anxiety through whispering
it would sort of give you emotional support.
And to some participants, the assistant would still be more of a way to control devices at your home
(like you do nowadays).
But for some, it would still act as a therapist or an advisor.
And this is really different from how we think of our assistant today. So we thought this was something interesting to speculate.
And also, some of the participants felt like it would be amazing if they could also get some help in making decisions in life.
So this is also something that we speculate in the short film.
What kind of questions would they be, and how much would the user actually trust their assistant's advice.
So research shows that whispering creates new experiences of interacting with voice assistants.
And these we name these the experiential qualities of whispering.
When our participants in the workshops were initially reacting to
the sound of a whispering Alexa, many of them described whispering as creepy.
This was because it felt like it was not necessarily always the correct context to whisper in.
What is the right or wrong context of whispering is more or less
a sociocultural question, but the participants explained that whispering is creepy when it
is socially or contextually not necessary or a norm, e.g. when whispering even though
no one else is around or when there is no need, during nights or when whispering a laugh.
When the participants were to think about whispering to their future voice assistants
they expressed it would make them feel safe, calm, cared for, even intimate.
It makes sense since it also brings a sense of closeness since, in order to whisper to your assistant, you need the system
to be within an intimate reception by the ear. It needs to be very close to you.
So, therefore, you get this emotional but also physical closeness and intimacy with your assistant.
Then we also have trust that we describe as 'willingness to become vulnerable'.
This is something that we highlight in the short film by showing different kind of questions
and how the trust towards the assistant grows as the day goes by.
The short film also raises several open-ended questions relating to the experiential qualities, such as:
What are the limits to how human-like we want our technologies to be, and how close we want to be with them?
Can the trust created by an increased sense of empathy from this device
be beneficial to a us, or are we doomed to rely on technology even more in the future?
What does this mean to our freedom of choice and expression?
These questions are hardly resolved by this research but instead addressed
for future speculations to be explored and evaluated in RtD and other empirical studies.
We want to thank the Royal Insitute of Technology
for support and encouragement and all the participants who took part of the workshop
and design probe experiment.
I want to also thank my friend Karolina Furberg for acting out in
the short film and Nadia Campo Woytuk for all the inspiration that she gave me.
And I want to thank you all for your time. Thank you much.