New Revelation: The ‘Social’ Side of Voice-User Interface in 2022

Voice-user interface is showing the social side to interact with users in 2022

Households around the world are becoming smart homes, thanks to Alexa, Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Jibo. They are only different brands of smart devices— the first three being smart speakers and the last one being a social robot. They are based on an amazing technology called voice-user interface (VUI). VUIs allow users to interact vocally with the device, thereby, making the interface seem "natural". From getting news updates to listening to preferred music, and from preparing shopping lists to letting us know who won the Oscars or the Grammy awards a decade back, they are ready to assist us in our varied queries. With big tech firms like Amazon and Google among others innovating and marketing them vigorously they are becoming more and more accessible. With the increasing presence of such smart assistants by our side it is only expected that intense research studies will be done by scrutinizing their role and status.

Recently a new behavioural study frontier about the VUIs emerged when it was revealed how social dimensions are becoming a major determinant in deciding the status of these smart devices. Three collaborative studies, having the title Speed Dating with Voice User Interfaces: Understanding How Families Interact and Perceive Voice User Interfaces in a Group Setting, were conducted by researchers from the Media Lab of the MIT and the Information Science department of Cornell University, both higher academic institutions of high repute. Noting that such devices are used in multi-user environments, the study embarked on exploring the group setting and family environment. The studies were motivated to explore the different kinds of interactions and perceptions about respective VUIs. The multiple focus of the studies included agent exploration activity, perceived personality activity, and user experience ranking activity.

The first study was exploring how users interact with and perceive the devices without any modifications to their commercial default settings. In this study, families interacted with Jibo (wake word: "Hey Jibo"), Amazon Echo (wake word: "Hey Alexa"), and Google Home (wake word: "Hey Google"). In the second study, the researchers investigated the same three VUIs and primed participants to consider the manufacturer and company that built and designed the device. The wake words were adapted to emphasise the company (thus, "Hey Jibo," "Hey Amazon," "Hey Google"). The third study further modified the arrangement to create a spectrum of a social embodiment with the designated VUIs. Participants interacted with Jibo (most socially embodied; wake word: "Hey Jibo"), Amazon Echo Spot modified with a rotating flag as an additional attention mechanism (middle socially embodied; wake word: "Hey Alexa"), and Amazon Echo Show (least socially embodied; wake word: "Hey Computer"). All the studies, according to the researchers, revealed strikingly similar result patterns, demonstrating the impact of concepts such as embodiment and social presence on user interaction and perception.

In more concrete terms, consumers across the world tend to interact significantly more with an agent with a higher degree of social embodiment, such agent being perceived as more trustworthy, evoking higher emotional engagement and higher companionship. It offers mental support to the elderly generation as well as a play-partner to kids. Among the smart agents studied by the team, the one with the higher degree of social embodiment was the social robot, Jibo, that received the most trust, high emotional engagement, and companionship among the participants. It is known that consumers would also interact more with their family members while the social robot is around. In Jibo's case, in yet another revealing way, its direct gaze at the users and human-like feedback gestures enhanced its credibility even more with the users feeling more inclined to interact with it.

Voice-user interfaces can confirm one essential truth about the technology-human interface. That human beings by virtue of being fundamentally human prefer greater natural communication gestures from tech artifacts. Thus, if smart assistants adopt human-like personality attributes and cues they are bound to generate greater intimacy with the users. Simply put, technology can acquire much greater legitimacy by being 'social', and not being rigidly mechanical.  There are certain viral videos where the elderly generation and the new generation want to communicate with these voice assistants with more interest and curiosity than the present generation.