How do families integrate smart speakers and conversational AI into their homes?
Our research team was fortunate to have 10 diverse families participate in a month-long research study investigating how families interact with smart speakers. We worked with families who had not had a smart speaker in their home prior to the study, and we provided Amazon Echo Dots to each family to set up and use in their home. As a result, I, and members of the research team, conducted multiple analyses of our data which resulted in three research papers exploring different aspects of smart speaker use in the family home, and one paper on the method used for audio data collection during the study.
I’d like to thank Mozilla for funding the study and I’d like to thank our participant families for their time and participation.
Blog Posts: Using my Speech-Language Pathology Background to Inform the Design and Use of Conversational AI
“Alexa, Let’s Work on Your Communication Skills”
“Parenting with Alexa While the Family is at Home”
Publications: Design guidelines for designers of conversational AI as well as details of user experiences.
Erin Beneteau, Julie A Kientz, Ashley Boone, Jason Yip, Yuxing Wu, and Alexis Hiniker. 2020. Parenting with Alexa: Exploring the Introduction of Smart Speakers on Family Dynamics. (2020), In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘20).
Erin Beneteau, Yini Guan, Olivia K Richards, Mingrui Ray Zhang, Julie A Kientz, Jason Yip, and Alexis Hiniker. 2020. Assumptions Checked: How Families Learn About and Use the Echo Dot. In Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. 4, 1 (March 2020), 3:1-3:23. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3380993
Accompanying Tableau Visualization for Assumptions Checked paper can be found here on Tableau Public here.
Erin Beneteau, Olivia K. Richards, Mingrui Zhang, Julie A. Kientz, Jason Yip, and Alexis Hiniker. 2019. Communication Breakdowns Between Families and Alexa. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 243:1–243:13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300473
Alexis Hiniker, Jon E. Froehlich, Mingrui Zhang, and Erin Beneteau. 2019. Anchored Audio Sampling: A Seamless Method for Exploring Children’s Thoughts During Deployment Studies. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8:1–8:13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300238
Anchored Audio Sampling was a best paper award winner