Bilingual by default: Voice Assistants and the role of code-switching in creating a bilingual user experience
It addresses a user experience problem for bilingual individuals, but is incremental as it builds on existing bilingual interaction phenomena.
The paper tackles the problem of monolingual design in Voice Assistants, which fails to support bilingual users, and argues that enabling code-switching can improve inclusivity and user experience for this group.
Conversational User Interfaces such as Voice Assistants are hugely popular. Yet they are designed to be monolingual by default, lacking support for, or sensitivity to, the bilingual dialogue experience. In this provocation paper, we highlight the language production challenges faced in VA interaction for bilingual users. We argue that, by facilitating phenomena seen in bilingual interaction, such as code-switching, we can foster a more inclusive and improved user experience for bilingual users. We also explore ways that this might be achieved, through the support of multiple language recognition as well as being sensitive to the preferences of code-switching in speech output.