Understanding user perceptions of proactive smart speakers

Abstract

Voice assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Home, increasingly find their way into consumer homes. Their functionality, however, is currently limited to being passive answer machines rather than proactively engaging users in conversations. Speakers' proactivity would open up a range of important application scenarios, including health services, such as checking in on patient states and triggering medication reminders. It remains unclear how passive speakers should implement proactivity. To better understand user perceptions, we ran a 3-week field study with 13 participants where we modified the off-the-shelf Google Home to become proactive. During the study, our speaker proactively t..