Making it easier for older people to talk to smart homes: the effect of early help prompts

Abstract

It is well known that help prompts shape how users talk to spoken dialogue systems. This study investigated the effect of help prompt placement on older users' interaction with a smart home interface. In the dynamic help condition, help was only given in response to system errors; in the inherent help condition, it was also given at the start of each task. Fifteen older and sixteen younger users interacted with a smart home system using two different scenarios. Each scenario consisted of several tasks. The linguistic style users employed to communicate with the system (interaction style) was measured using the ratio of commands to the overall utterance length (keyword ratio) and the percentage of content words in the user's utterance that could be understood by the system (shared vocabulary). While the timing of help prompts did not affect the interaction style of younger users, it was early task-specific help supported older users in adapting their interaction style to the system's capabilities. Well-placed help prompts can significantly increase the usability of spoken dialogue systems for older people.

Designing a spoken dialogue interface to an intelligent cognitive assistant for people with dementia

“…Wolters et al [23] showed that older users are more likely to use words the system can understand when help is given at the beginning of a task. On the other hand, users who have a strong internal locus of control may prefer to ask the system for help themselves -an ICA that prompts at the first sign of a potential problem could be seen to be demeaning and patronising.…”

The MATCH corpus: a corpus of older and younger users’ interactions with spoken dialogue systems

“…Should not the focus be on devising strategies that enable systems to shape the user's input (Ringle and Halstead-Nussloch 1989) or provide adequate help (Bohus and Rudnicky 2005)? Even though it is possible to sufficiently shape some older users' input Wolters et al 2010), the effects of ageing on social cognition discussed in the previous paragraph suggest that some older users would fail to adapt their speech to the requirements of the system. Those users would still need ASR and NLU engines that can cope with a rich vocabulary and a complex set of speech acts.…”

Towards context-aware assistive applications for aging in place via real-life-proof activity detection

“…When an activity is not detected within a given period of time in the day, a message could be displayed (e.g., on a tablet or on TV) to remind the user about an activity. In a user-centered design framework, this kind of assistive application should be designed according to the user needs [45,46]. For example, Ms. Dupont usually prepares her dinner between 6:30PM and 8:00PM.…”