Conversational Successes and Breakdowns in Everyday Smart Glasses Use

TL;DR

This study explores how everyday users experience successes and failures in voice-only interactions with smart glasses, providing insights to improve future interface design.

Contribution

It offers a detailed analysis of real-world conversational patterns with smart glasses, highlighting unique challenges and opportunities for voice-only interfaces.

Findings

Identified common patterns of conversational successes and breakdowns.

Compared smart glasses interactions with other voice-only systems to reveal unique affordances.

Provided design implications for future smart glasses interfaces.

Abstract

Non-Display Smart Glasses hold the potential to support everyday activities by combining continuous environmental sensing with voice-only interaction powered by large language models (LLMs). Understanding how conversational successes and breakdowns arise in everyday contexts can better inform the design of future voice-only interfaces. To investigate this, we conducted a month-long collaborative autoethnography (n=2) to identify patterns of successes and breakdowns when using such devices. We then compare these patterns with prior findings on voice-only interactions to highlight the unique affordances and opportunities offered by non-display smart glasses.