Mapping Perceptions of Humanness in Intelligent Personal Assistant Interaction

Abstract

Humanness is core to speech interface design. Yet little is known about how users conceptualise perceptions of humanness and how people define their interaction with speech interfaces through this. To map these perceptions n=21 participants held dialogues with a human and two speech interface based intelligent personal assistants, and then reflected and compared their experiences using the repertory grid technique. Analysis of the constructs show that perceptions of humanness are multidimensional, focusing on eight key themes: partner knowledge set, interpersonal connection, linguistic content, partner performance and capabilities, conversational interaction, partner identity and role, vocal qualities and behavioral affordances. Through these themes, it is clear that users define the capabilities of speech interfaces differently to humans, seeing them as more formal, fact based, impersonal and less authentic. Based on the findings, we discuss how the themes help to scaffold, categorise and target research and design efforts, considering the appropriateness of emulating humanness.

Measuring Voice UX Quantitatively

“…Perceived power [46]; Conformity in decision-making [30]; Helpfulness [25]; [13]; Attractiveness diferences [6]; Self-efciency [7]; Interaction questionnaire [19]; Godspeed questionnaire [19] illustrates how most categories have relied on lab-based studies.…”

Mental Workload and Language Production in Non-Native Speaker IPA Interaction

“…Our findings are limited to a relatively constrained linguistic task of IPA interaction. IPAs are generally designed to perform simple tasks [3,13] through question-answer adjacency pair dialogues [20,38], rather than being designed for more conversational or openended speech tasks [10,16]. It is important that future research considers the nature of L2 speech behaviours in these more openended scenarios.…”

What Do We See in Them? Identifying Dimensions of Partner Models for Speech Interfaces Using a Psycholexical Approach

“…Unlike embodied conversational agents (ECAs) or robots, speech agents rely heavily on voice as a primary form of interaction, lacking the embodiment required for common forms of non-linguistic communication (e.g. physical gestures) [49]. Speech agent interaction research has emphasised the importance of user's perceptions toward a system's competence and communicative ability as a dialogue partner (i.e.…”

“…Speech agent interaction research has emphasised the importance of user's perceptions toward a system's competence and communicative ability as a dialogue partner (i.e. their partner models), impacting speech choices [16,40] and the types of tasks that users entrust speech agents with [49,88]. However, while the role of partner models is widely acknowledged [16,39,40,88,97], the concept is currently underdefned with regards to its underlying dimensions.…”