Orla Cooney

Justin Edwards, Orla Cooney, Rachel Edwards

Alexa Skills are used for a variety of daily routines and purposes, but little research has focused on a key part of many people's daily lives: their pets. We present a systematic review categorizing the purposes of 88 Alexa Skills aimed at pets and pet owners and introduce a veterinary perspective to assess their benefits and risks. We present 8 themes of the purposes for Skills aimed at pets and their owners: Calming, Animal Audience, Smart Device, Tracking, Training and Health, Translator, Entertainment/Trivia, and Other - Human Audience. Broadly, we find that these purposes mirror the purposes people have for using Alexa overall, and they largely are supported by veterinary evidence, though caution must be used when Skills relate to animal health. More collaboration between Conversational Agent researchers and animal scientists is called for to better understand the efficacy of using Alexa with pets.

Leigh Clark, Nadia Pantidi, Orla Cooney et al.

Conversational agents promise conversational interaction but fail to deliver. Efforts often emulate functional rules from human speech, without considering key characteristics that conversation must encapsulate. Given its potential in supporting long-term human-agent relationships, it is paramount that HCI focuses efforts on delivering this promise. We aim to understand what people value in conversation and how this should manifest in agents. Findings from a series of semi-structured interviews show people make a clear dichotomy between social and functional roles of conversation, emphasising the long-term dynamics of bond and trust along with the importance of context and relationship stage in the types of conversations they have. People fundamentally questioned the need for bond and common ground in agent communication, shifting to more utilitarian definitions of conversational qualities. Drawing on these findings we discuss key challenges for conversational agent design, most notably the need to redefine the design parameters for conversational agent interaction.