Classifying Smart Personal Assistants: an Empirical Cluster Analysis
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Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2019 Classifying Smart Personal Assistants: An Empirical Cluster Analysis Robin Knote Andreas Janson Matthias Söllner University of Kassel University of Kassel University of St.Gallen and [email protected] [email protected] University of Kassel [email protected] Jan Marco Leimeister University of St.Gallen and University of Kassel [email protected] Abstract provision. In practice, SPAs unfold their potential in various forms and contexts [8], such as on smartphones The digital age has yielded systems that [38], in smart home environments [11], in cars [5], in increasingly reduce the complexity of our everyday service encounters [43], or as support for elderly or lives. As such, smart personal assistants such as impaired people [11]. Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri combine the comfort of However, prominent examples such as those intuitive natural language interaction with the utility of mentioned above represent SPAs that are explicitly personalized and situation-dependent information and developed for a broad consumer market. They thus are service provision. However, research on SPAs is only the tip of the iceberg. Since the idea of becoming increasingly complex and opaque. To reduce information systems (IS) that pervasively assist complexity, this paper introduces a classification humans in conducting certain tasks is by far not new, system for SPAs. Based on a systematic literature numerous efforts were made in IS, computer science review, a cluster analysis reveals five SPA archetypes: and human-computer-interaction research to develop Adaptive Voice (Vision) Assistants, Chatbot Assistants, SPAs as previously defined. Simultaneously, research Embodied Virtual Assistants, Passive Pervasive and practice has often neglected to ‘stand on the Assistants, and Natural Conversation Assistants. shoulders of giants’ by building up on each other’s work. This has led to a partly overlapping diversity of concepts and terms for the developed artifact. For example, while many scholars entitle their SPA as a 1. Introduction conversational agent, others would differ between mainly text-based and voice-based systems. Still others In recent years, technical progress has brought us would label the text-based SPA as chatbot and the systems that increasingly reduce the complexity of our voice-based SPA as smart speaker. This example everyday lives. Thereby, smart personal assistants shows, that the range of possible terms for different (SPAs), defined as systems that use “input such as the types of SPAs differ heavily due to lacking conceptual user’s voice […] and contextual information to provide clarity. The interchangeable use of terms has also been assistance by answering questions in natural language, observed by other scholars [e.g., 8]. making recommendations and performing actions” [4, We, however, argue that conceptual clarity is p. 223], have just conquered a broad consumer market. highly important, not only for a correct categorization Recent forecasts predict the worldwide user count for of SPAs to a higher-order group. It is also important SPAs such as Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri or for finding similarities and differences between Microsoft Cortana to increase from 390 million in systems, identifying design principles, recurring 2015 to 1.8 billion in 2021, which results in 2.3 billion requirements and design practices (i.e., patterns) and, USD average sales growth per year [33]. These finally, reline future research and practice with a systems’ success story is mainly because digital reliable structure to allocate SPA-related work. assistants combine the comfort of intuitive natural Therefore, this paper offers a classification approach language interaction with the utility of personalized for SPAs. Based on an exhaustive literature review, we and situation-dependent information and service derived design characteristics of 115 SPAs that were developed within a research project or for commercial URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/59642 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-2-6 Page 2024 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) purposes. We further performed a k-means cluster that helps users to do their activities” as an analysis to yield groups of SPAs which, according to “intermediary between humans and other agents in a the design characteristics, have a high internal multiagent environment.” The term ‘agent’ aims to homogeneity (i.e., most similar items are within one point out that the SPA as an autonomous entity is cluster) and a high external heterogeneity (i.e., each capable of perceiving and taking actions within its cluster is highly distinctive to other clusters). An environment to achieve a certain goal [27], namely to analysis of the clusters, their similarities and assist the user conducting a specific task. Further, the differences, resulted in archetypes of SPAs, which are SPA as an agent (e.g., Alexa) is able to interact with defined by the most expressive design characteristics other agents, such as technical agents (e.g., a smart of each cluster. We thus aim to contribute to research fridge) and human agents (users). The multi-agent by providing a classification for SPAs that aid future concept also encompasses a layer view. Therein, an SPA research to yield more specific and meaningful SPA consists of different layers, each conducting a contributions. We further contribute to practice by specific sub-task (e.g., interface agent, interaction showing design differences between the various SPA agent, transaction agent). For example, the user types which may influence development decisions. interacts with the interface agent which delegates more The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. specific tasks to other types of agents [12]. In this Section 2 provides background information about context, the SPA serves as single, ubiquitous and easy- SPAs to establish a shared understanding. We describe to-access entry point to a smart service infrastructure our methodology in section 3. In section 4 we present The main purpose of SPAs is to enhance the user’s the results of our literature review and cluster analysis. perception, cognition and/or action abilities [16]. From Those are briefly discussed in section 5. The paper a sociotechnical perspective and compared to other concludes with a short outlook. classes of information systems, the novelty of SPAs lies in two major aspects: the way how users interact 2. Background with the device as well as the assistant’s knowledgeability and human-like behavior, often summarized as artificial intelligence [21, 27]. Maedche Although SPAs have just recently gained success et al. [21] suggest a classification of user assistance on the consumer market, personal assistance provided systems based on two dimensions, which we will use by information systems (IS) is not a novel research later on in this paper for cluster analysis: (1) the degree topic at all. In the past, research in the field of artificial of intelligence of the system and (2) the degree of intelligence (AI) and focused on expert systems in interaction implemented by the system. Advanced user relatively limited domains [18]. However, the advent assistance systems combine both intelligence and of technical evolutions, such as cloud-service interaction to anticipate future situations and infrastructure, natural language processing, semantic proactively adapt their assistance. From a service reasoning, voice recognition and voice synthesis paved science perspective, SPAs can be considered agents in the way for modern SPAs such as Apple’s Siri, a broader smart service system [23]. Microsoft’s Cortana, Samsung’s Bixby, Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Google Assistant and also chatbots in the service encounter. These smart service systems 3. Method interact with the user via natural language and offer many opportunities of service and information As a foundation for our cluster analysis, we provision to reduce effort and complexity of users’ conducted a systematic literature review1 [39, 40] to everyday tasks [8]. identify SPAs developed for research and for However, a general definition for SPAs (or commercial purposes. In detail, we first performed an respective synonyms) up until now is missing. A broad open database search among AISeL, IEEE Xplore, definition approach has already been conducted by ACM DL, EBSCO Business Source Premier, Baber [4, p. 223] who considered an SPA to be “an ScienceDirect, ProQuest and Google Scholar using the application that uses input such as the user’s voice… keywords “smart assistant” OR “conversational and contextual information to provide assistance by agent” OR “virtual assistant” OR “assistance system” answering questions in natural language, making OR “personal assistant”). The search phase was recommendations and performing actions”. More adapted to fit databases’ syntactic requirements and the technical definitions stem from the field of computer science (CS) and draw on the term agent to describe 1 SPAs. For example, Fuckner et al. [12, p. 89] describe A concept matrix that provides a detailed list of the reviewed articles and relations to our results is available at: an SPA as a “specialized intelligent artificial agent http://downloads.wi- kassel.de/rkn/HICSS19/Knote_et_al_Appendix.pdf Page 2025 search was limited to title, abstract, keywords and a binary vectors, and 25 different random starting publication period from 2000 to date. The initial open assignments from which R selected the best result database