Challenges and Opportunities for the Design of Smart Speakers

TL;DR

This paper reviews voice user interface (VUI) design for smart speakers, synthesizing guidelines and user insights to identify challenges and opportunities for improving user engagement and experience.

Contribution

It provides a systematic review of VUI design guidelines and combines user interviews to highlight key challenges and explore new design opportunities for smart speakers.

Findings

Identified five themes of VUI design guidelines.

Highlighted four major challenges leading to non-use.

Proposed four opportunity areas for enhancing smart speaker design.

Abstract

Advances in voice technology and voice user interfaces (VUIs) -- such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Home -- have opened up the potential for many new types of interaction. However, despite the potential of these devices reflected by the growing market and body of VUI research, there is a lingering sense that the technology is still underused. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review of 35 papers to identify and synthesize 127 VUI design guidelines into five themes. Additionally, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 smart speaker users to understand their use and non-use of the technology. From the interviews, we distill four design challenges that contribute the most to non-use. Based on their (non-)use, we identify four opportunity spaces for designers to explore such as focusing on information support while multitasking (cooking, driving, childcare, etc), incorporating users' mental models for smart speakers, and integrating calm design principles.