Eliciting and Analysing Users' Envisioned Dialogues with Perfect Voice Assistants

TL;DR

This study explores how users imagine ideal conversations with a perfect voice assistant, revealing expectations for intelligence, proactivity, and social interaction, with variations influenced by personality.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into user visions of perfect voice assistants through a large survey, analyzing social and functional aspects of imagined dialogues.

Findings

Users envision interactive, knowledgeable, and proactive VAs.

Attitudes vary on humor and opinions expressed by VAs.

Personality influences perceptions but with low correlation.

Abstract

We present a dialogue elicitation study to assess how users envision conversations with a perfect voice assistant (VA). In an online survey, N=205 participants were prompted with everyday scenarios, and wrote the lines of both user and VA in dialogues that they imagined as perfect. We analysed the dialogues with text analytics and qualitative analysis, including number of words and turns, social aspects of conversation, implied VA capabilities, and the influence of user personality. The majority envisioned dialogues with a VA that is interactive and not purely functional; it is smart, proactive, and has knowledge about the user. Attitudes diverged regarding the assistant's role as well as it expressing humour and opinions. An exploratory analysis suggested a relationship with personality for these aspects, but correlations were low overall. We discuss implications for research and design of future VAs, underlining the vision of enabling conversational UIs, rather than single command "Q&As".