Hi, this is Yaxin Hu from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Today I'll present our paper Polite or Direct? Conversation Design of a Smart Display for
Older Adults Based on Politeness Theory. My collaborators are Yuxiao Qu, Adam Maus
and Bilge Mutlu.
With the population of older adults growing worldwide,
voice-activated devices have been widely deployed to improve their quality of life. Those devices
are particularly promising to address older users' motor, vision, and cognitive challenges.
However, dialogue-based interactions can be burdensome as they require constant
attention to progress the interaction. This can be particularly challenging for older adults.
To address those challenges, our approach is to use politeness strategies in the conversation design of those
voice interfaces. In practice, we applied the linguistic politeness strategies in a
voice-activated health intervention system.
We will talk about our approaches in more details in the following four sections.
Conversation design, system evaluation, findings and design implications
First, for the conversation design, we start with identifying the repeated speech acts of the system's prompts.
One example for the speech act request is that "tell me a rating from one to five"
when the system asks users to rate their health conditions.
Another example for suggest, saying that Let's begin the lesson
now when the user enters the learning module. In total, we identified seven common speech acts.
Request, comment, farewell, welcome, suggest, repair, and instruct.
Then we analyzed the face needs of each speech act to help us select politeness strategies.
For instance, the face need of request is to minimize the impositions of the request.
The face needs of suggest is to protect the user's freedom of choices, minimize the impositions as well as show cares for the user and be willing to help.
We selected politeness strategies based on face
needs for each speech act. Then we conducted a formative study to finalize the strategies.
In this study, each participant rated their perception of the system prompt's directness,
positive politeness, and negative politeness.
Based on the study results, we built two systems. The polite system uses positive
and negative politeness strategies. The direct system uses the bald-on-record strategy.
Here is an example to compare the two systems.
For the speech act welcome, the polite system would say "I'm here to help you
manage your health". This prompt used the positive politeness strategy assume or assert reciprocity.
On the other hand, the direct system would simply say "welcome."
Other examples of using politeness strategies include the use of "let's"
when giving a suggestion and using "could you" when making
a request.
We further conducted a user study to evaluate people's experience with the
two systems. For the field study, we recruited 15 participants who are aged 60 and above
the system was deployed in their homes for 10 days
We randomized the participants into two groups.
During the first five days, Group 1 used the direct system and group 2 used the polite system.
In the second five days, group 1 used the polite system and group 2 used the direct system.
On day one of the system onboarding, we performed system installation and user training. On day 5,
we asked survey questions and conducted semi-structured interviews with participants. We
also notified participants of the system change on day 5. On day 10, we asked the same questions as on day 5
and uninstalled the system.
We performed both qualitative and quantitative measurements.
Qualitative measures come from the user interviews on day 5 and day10.
Quantitative measures have two parts. First, the questionnaire on day 5 and day 10 asked about the perceived system
politeness, the experience of system failures, and the participant's overall satisfaction.
Second, the system log includes the interaction duration,
task completion rate, and usage of the voice interface and touchscreen.
Based on our findings, we concluded the four user personas.
The first persona is socially-oriented follower. They have a positive view towards
the overall polite system, while preferring linguistic politeness than directness.
They view the system as
human-like and describe the system as a friend and someone who cares about you.
They tend to have a passive interaction mode and always follow the system's guidance. They also focus on the conversational experience of the system rather than the functional goal.
They preferred the voice interface to the touchscreen saying that the voice is relaxing.
The second persona utility-oriented follower. They have a positive view towards the overall polite
system, while having mixed views on linguistic politeness. They view the system as human-like and
described it as professional, or a teacher or someone who is knowledgeable. They also tend to follow the system's guidance and have a passive interaction mode. Different from persona 1, they have a
functional goal of system usage such as getting answers for questions and they have a mixed preference towards modalities.
The third persona socially-oriented leader. They have a positive view towards the overall
polite system and have mixed views on linguistic politeness. They view the system as a machine and described it with words such as AI, robot, device
And they prefers to lead the interaction rather than being guided by the system. They have a functional goal,
often is to fulfill the study requirement, and they have mixed preferences towards modalities.
The fourth persona utility oriented leader. They have a neutral view towards
the overall polite system and prefer linguistic directness to politeness.
They described the system as a machine,
and prefer to interact with the system proactively, rather than being guided by it.
They have functional goal of using the system, mostly related to tasks or the study requirement. And they prefer to use touch than voice interfaces
saying that they use touchscreen whenever they can.
Based on our findings, we proposed personalized design strategies
for the interaction on the smart display.
Another design implication is that we explored the design space for polite conversational interface
We observed the three factors that affect people's perceived politeness of the system
linguistic politeness strategies, vocal features, and interaction pace.
Therefore, we suggested that future design could consider those factors in designing a polite a conversational interface
Thank you for your time in listening! Please check our paper for more details.
You can contact us through the email here if you have further questions.