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Progressivity for voice interface design

Published: 22 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Drawing from Conversation Analysis (CA), we examine how the orientation towards progressivity in talk-keeping things moving-might help us better understand and design for voice interactions. We introduce progressivity by surveying its explication in CA, and then look at how a strong preference for progressivity in conversation works out practically in sequences of voice interaction recorded in people's homes. Following Stivers and Robinson's work on progressivity, we find our data shows: how non-answer responses impede progress; how accounts offered for non-answer responses can lead to recovery; how participants work to receive answers; and how, ultimately, moving the interaction forwards does not necessarily involve a fitted answer, but other kinds of responses as well. We discuss the wider potential of applying progressivity to evaluate and understand voice interactions, and consider what designers of voice experiences might do to design for progressivity. Our contribution is a demonstration of the progressivity principle and its interactional features, which also points towards the need for specific kinds of future developments in speech technology.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
CUI '19: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
August 2019
131 pages
ISBN:9781450371872
DOI:10.1145/3342775
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • CogSIS Project: CogSIS Project
  • ADAPT: ADAPT Centre
  • Irish Research Council: Irish Research Council

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 August 2019

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Author Tags

  1. VUI
  2. conversation analysis
  3. design
  4. speech
  5. voice

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  • Research-article

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CUI 2019
Sponsor:
  • CogSIS Project
  • ADAPT
  • Irish Research Council

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CUI '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 28 submissions, 32%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 34 of 100 submissions, 34%

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  • (2024)Interactive probes: Towards action-level evaluation for dialogue systemsDiscourse & Communication10.1177/17504813241267071Online publication date: 12-Sep-2024
  • (2024)User practices in dealing with trouble in interactions with virtual assistants in German: Repeating, altering and insistingDiscourse & Communication10.1177/175048132411271494Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Voice Assistants' Accountability through Explanatory DialoguesProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665557(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Cooking With Agents: Designing Context-aware Voice InteractionProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642183(1-13)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)AI in situated action: a scoping review of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studiesAI & SOCIETY10.1007/s00146-024-01919-xOnline publication date: 4-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Konversationelle Assistenten und ihre Anwendungen in Gesundheit und NephrologieInnovationen in der Nephrologie10.1007/978-3-031-65236-3_18(317-340)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Working with troubles and failures in conversation between humans and robots: workshop reportFrontiers in Robotics and AI10.3389/frobt.2023.120230610Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Wieso eigentlich Alexa?kommunikation@gesellschaft10.15460/kommges.2023.24.1.119424:1Online publication date: 24-Nov-2023
  • (2023)A Walk in the Park With Robodog: Navigating Around Pedestrians Using a Spot Robot as a “Guide Dog”Space and Culture10.1177/12063312231159215Online publication date: 6-Mar-2023
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