Talk to me: Exploring user interactions with the Amazon Alexa

Abstract

Amazon Alexa is a voice-controlled application that is rapidly gaining popularity. We examined user interactions with this technology, and focused on the types of tasks requested of Alexa, the variables that affect user behaviors with Alexa, and Alexa’s alternatives. The data about Alexa usage were collected from 19 participants via the online questionnaire and diary methods over the course of several days. The results indicate that across all age groups, Alexa was primarily used for checking weather forecasts, playing music, and controlling other devices. Several participants reported using Apple Siri and Google Now applications in addition to Alexa for similar purposes except for controlling other devices. Alexa uses over the weekends were more frequent than on weekdays, but its overall usage tended to decrease over time. The users reported being satisfied with Alexa even when it did not produce sought information, suggesting that the interaction experience is more important to the users than the interaction output. More work is required to understand whether users treat Alexa and similar voice-controlled applications as primarily a traditional information retrieval system, a casual leisure system, a control interface for smart home devices, or, simply, a new toy.

Designing Immersive Audio Experiences for News and Information in the Internet of Things using Text-to-Speech Objects

“…The hybrid content consisted of key design considerations to address the issues observed in the previous two pieces of content. These three articles were studied to investigate the mental and temporal demands (Lopatovska, 2018), frustration, effort and performance of listening to the content. The questionnaire then took the same approaches and investigated which version of the same article provided the most knowledge, yielded the highest level of engagement, was most difficult to follow and what/if any of the designed content in the custom audio created a higher sense of immersion.…”

“…Publishers are being forced to adapt to seemingly everincreasing technological advances in order to survive in the changing landscape of news and information medias. Engagement with quality journalism was on the decline amongst younger demographics and no clear solution is on the horizon (Kobo, 2017;Lopatovska 2018). Smart speakers present a possible solution for addressing this challenge as they offer new methods for audience engagement.…”

“…Mckenzie (Gabay, 2018a) does, however, highlight the challenges faced, infancy of such platforms, natural language processing and discoverability and interaction to name a few. Unfortunately, for this sector, people are not using these smart devices for news (Edison 2017;Lopatovska, 2018). "There"s quite a lot of work that we need to do to come up with, propositions that will be really engaging and exciting and will make people want to consume their news on voice-controlled devices."…”

“…Robert McKenzie (Gabay, 2018a). Publishers may need to capture audiences the moment they set up these smart devices as research shows owners set up their devices with the content they are familiar with and tend not to update their preferences (Lopatovska, 2018). Furthermore, the use of audio-based journalism to engage audiences, peaks at 7am (weekdays) and 8am (weekends) for the breakfast hour and similarly with early evenings (6pm) (Gabay, 2018a;Scribblelive, 2018).…”

“…Furthermore, the use of audio-based journalism to engage audiences, peaks at 7am (weekdays) and 8am (weekends) for the breakfast hour and similarly with early evenings (6pm) (Gabay, 2018a;Scribblelive, 2018). These trends show the spikes for when people are most likely to consume such content (Edison, 2017;Lopatovska, 2018). Unfortunately, for local and regional news outlets, creating content creates resourcing challenges some are not able to meet.…”