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Exploring Voice Assistant Risks and Potential with Technology-Based Users Exploring Voice Assistant Risks and Potential with Technology-based Users Andreas M. Klein1 a, Andreas Hinderks1 b, Maria Rauschenberger2 c and Jorg¨ Thomaschewski3 d 1Department of Computer Languages and Systems, University of Seville, Seville, Spain 2Social Computing Systems, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrucken,¨ Germany 3Faculty of Technology, University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer, Emden, Germany Keywords: Voice User Interface, VUI, Conversational User Interface, CUI, Smart Personal Assistant, SPA, Voice Assistant, VA, Frequency of Use, Context of Use, Privacy. Abstract: Voice user interfaces (VUIs) or voice assistants (VAs) such as Google Home or Google Assistant (Google), Cortana (Mircosoft), Siri (Apple) or Alexa (Amazon) are highly available in the consumer sector and present a smart home trend. Still, the acceptance seems to be culture-dependent, while the syntax of communication poses a challenge. So, there are some basic questions: ‘Why do people buy VAs?’ ‘What do they use them for?’ ‘What could be improved in the future?’. We explore the opinion of a German technology-based user group to identify the challenges and opportunities of VAs. We focus on the interaction behaviour, frequency of use, concerns, and opinions of this target group as they show a higher variety of interaction as well as privacy concerns in representative population studies. Our preliminary findings confirm previous results (missing accuracy of commands and serious concerns about privacy issues) and show that technology-based users from Germany are intensive users, although with particular concerns about data collection. Probably, there is a correlation between privacy concerns and speech intelligibility as queries relating to VAs are problematic due to repetitions and refinement. 1 INTRODUCTION 2019). Well-known examples are Google Assistant (Google), Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), Bixby Analysts predict a growing use for digital voice as- (Samsung), and Cortana (Microsoft). We refer to sistants and devices with voice control in the next these systems and devices with integrated voice few years (Tuzovic and Paluch, 2018). Current mar- user interfaces (VUIs) as voice assistant (VA) in the ket analyses expect a worldwide increase from almost following. On one hand, VAs are highly available 2 billion dollars in 2020 to almost 7 billion dollars in the consumer sector, as they are recently being in 2025 for voice- and speech-recognition software integrated into smart devices (also, internet of Things, (Tractica, 2020). This technology will and has al- IoTs), tablets and personal computers. On the other ready started: it has developed into a leading-edge hand, there is a high degree of scepticism about their technology with a wide range of applications in both use, especially in Germany (Tas et al., 2019). corporate and consumer sectors. The example ar- The quality of a product or application including eas are healthcare, automotive industry, authentica- VAs can be determined by measuring usability and tion and identification, voice commerce and customer user experience (UX) which are designed with the service, and smart home (Tractica, 2020). well-known Human-Centered Design framework When talking about digital voice assistants or (HCD) (ISO/TC 159/SC 4 Ergonomics of human- smart personal assistants, we consider the so-called system interaction, 2010). HCD is a standard to “general-purpose assistants”, that belong to the develop and evaluated, for example, products with “adaptive voice (vision) assistants” (Knote et al., a graphical user interfaces (GUI). But there are a currently no equal focus in frameworks to develop https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3161-1202 devices with VUIs. The UX of GUI is distinguished b https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3456-9273 c from VUI as voice and hearing abilities are different https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5722-576X from the visual ability. d https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6364-5808 147 Klein, A., Hinderks, A., Rauschenberger, M. and Thomaschewski, J. Exploring Voice Assistant Risks and Potential with Technology-based Users. DOI: 10.5220/0010150101470154 In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2020), pages 147-154 ISBN: 978-989-758-478-7 Copyright c 2020 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved WEBIST 2020 - 16th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies In order to meet the users’ requirements for VA input/output devices such as the keyboard and the applications in the future, the amount of personal data mouse combined with screens, i.e., graphical user required must increase, which at the same time leads interfaces (GUIs). The term ‘VUI’ mainly describes to higher concerns of the users regarding the protec- an interface as one component of an entire system to tion of their data and privacy (Tas et al., 2019). In communicate via, e.g., voice commands. Sometimes terms of adoption, Germany is far behind countries VUI is used to describe the overall system of a such as Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and it speech application that consists of different function is also behind countries such as the USA, India, and modules such as automatic speech recognition or China in global rankings in this particular area (Tas natural language processing. The overall systems of et al., 2019). a voice application or a VA are called a service or Therefore, we aim to explore how VAs are used device (Tas et al., 2019). VAs offer various integrated in Germany by a so-called technology-based (affine) functions (e.g., web search, online shopping), and its target group, which refers to people having a prefer- additional features are called ’skills’ or ’actions’ that ence for technology. We expect to find higher poten- can be included. These ’skills’ can serve different tial for improvement and the essential concerns in this purposes, (e.g., entertainment, smart home), and are target group to overcome barriers that might keep po- often provided by third parties. Besides, there are tential users from using VAs in Germany. The Ger- end-user environments that allow the use of preferred man study of the BVDW (BVDW e.V., 2017) shows online web services through VAs (Ripa et al., 2019). that VA user experience correlates with age, as three UX (ISO/TC 159/SC 4 Ergonomics of human- out of four users (16 to 24 years old) have already ex- system interaction, 2010) as a holistic concept, in- perience with VAs. This age group also has the most cluding all types of reactions, before, during, and af- diverse usage patterns and, at the same time, the high- ter the use of a product. Measuring the UX of prod- est concerns in the use of VAs. Hence, we explore the ucts applying GUI is possible using tools like the User context of use for VAs for this target group, which, Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) (Laugwitz et al., in this case, refers to students of technical courses in 2008), meCUE (Minge, Michael and Riedel, Laura, Germany. 2013) or UEQ+ (Schrepp and Thomaschewski, 2019) This article is structured as follows: Section 2 questionnaires, but these are not specific to products presents recent studies that focus on different aspects with VUI. of the contemporary use of VAs. The following Sec- The UX of devices with VUI is not sufficiently tion 3 explains the development and structure of our considered as these evaluation tools do not measure questionnaire while Section 4 describes the research the user’s expectations of VAs yet, i.e., compre- method. In Section 5 we cover our results and discuss hensibility, response behaviour, or response quality. our findings. We finish with conclusion and future VAs should capture the context without a particular work in Section 6. formulation to fulfill the users’s intentions. UX for voice interaction can be derived regarding the user, the system, and the context (Klein et al., 2020c). 2 BACKGROUND & RELATED Existing questionnaires need to be extended or a WORK new questionnaire should be created to evaluate VAs, which should lead to improvements in VAs. For ex- We briefly introduce VUI and VA terms and their re- ample, a new and flexible method is the modular quirements regarding usability and UX. Furthermore, framework UEQ+ based on various scales to con- we present several studies that explore VA user be- struct a product-specific questionnaire for which three haviour. The following VA characteristics regarding VUI scales have been developed but not validated yet our technology-based target group is of particular (Klein et al., 2020b). interest to explore the controversy of high availability Others (BVDW e.V., 2017; Biermann et al., 2019; of VUI vs. use: frequency of use, several user groups, Tas et al., 2019), however, focus on exploring current the context of use, and concerns of users. Since voice users, use cases, and systems to understand VAs interfaces and speech dialogue systems are recent, interaction, and finding design patterns. For example, there are various definitions. A concise and often the usability and UX of VUIs were described as quoted definition is: “A Voice User Interface (VUI) usable from a social media-based interest group, but is what a person interacts with when communicating they also identified challenges. Users had difficulties with spoken language application.” (Cohen et al., giving long commands, or commands have to be 2004). When interacting with information technology given multiple times to accomplish the task, or there systems, VUIs enable the user to work without classic would be problems with the integration with other 148 Exploring Voice Assistant Risks and Potential with Technology-based Users systems (Pyae and Joelsson, 2018). A population- focusing on the challenging aspects of VA applica- representative online survey among 1040 US citizens tions. Additionally, we want to know if challenges (aged ≥ 18 years) shows the usage behaviour con- such as the comprehension of commands has changed cerning different device groups (smartphone, smart since the latest evaluation of UX in 2018.
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