Exploring Interactions with Voice-Controlled TV

TL;DR

This paper investigates how users interact with a voice-controlled TV system focused on movie recommendations, highlighting design implications for improving voice-only interfaces and supporting exploration.

Contribution

It presents qualitative insights from user studies on a prototype voice-only recommendation system, offering design guidelines for future voice-controlled TV interfaces.

Findings

Voice-only interactions have limitations that need mitigation.

Balancing expressiveness and efficiency is crucial for user satisfaction.

Designing for exploration enhances user engagement with recommendations.

Abstract

Intelligent agents such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are now built into streaming TV systems, allowing people to use voice input to navigate the increasingly complex set of apps available on a TV. However, these systems typically support a narrow range of control- and search-oriented commands, and do not support deeper recommendation or exploration queries. To learn about how people interact with a recommendation-oriented voice-controlled TV, we use research through design methods to explore an early prototype movie recommendation system where the only input modality is voice. We describe in-depth qualitative research sessions with 11 participants. We contribute implications for designers of voice-controlled TV: mitigating the drawbacks of voice-only interactions, navigating the tension between expressiveness and efficiency, and building voice-driven recommendation interfaces that facilitate exploration.