Eliciting Spoken Interruptions to Inform Proactive Speech Agent Design
This work addresses the design of proactive speech agents for human-computer interaction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing interruption research without major breakthroughs.
The study tackled the problem of designing proactive speech agents that can interrupt users by investigating how people interrupt others during complex tasks, finding that interruptions occur sooner when urgent and that people balance speed and accuracy while using cues from the task.
Current speech agent interactions are typically user-initiated, limiting the interactions they can deliver. Future functionality will require agents to be proactive, sometimes interrupting users. Little is known about how these spoken interruptions should be designed, especially in urgent interruption contexts. We look to inform design of proactive agent interruptions through investigating how people interrupt others engaged in complex tasks. We therefore developed a new technique to elicit human spoken interruptions of people engaged in other tasks. We found that people interrupted sooner when interruptions were urgent. Some participants used access rituals to forewarn interruptions, but most rarely used them. People balanced speed and accuracy in timing interruptions, often using cues from the task they interrupted. People also varied phrasing and delivery of interruptions to reflect urgency. We discuss how our findings can inform speech agent design and how our paradigm can help gain insight into human interruptions in new contexts.