Challenges and Opportunities for the Design of Smart Speakers
This work addresses the problem of underutilization in smart speakers for designers and researchers, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing guidelines and user feedback without introducing new technological methods.
The paper tackled the underuse of smart speakers by conducting a systematic review of 35 papers to synthesize 127 design guidelines and interviewing 15 users to identify key challenges and opportunities, resulting in four design challenges and four opportunity spaces for improvement.
Advances in voice technology and voice user interfaces (VUIs) -- such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Home -- have opened up the potential for many new types of interaction. However, despite the potential of these devices reflected by the growing market and body of VUI research, there is a lingering sense that the technology is still underused. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review of 35 papers to identify and synthesize 127 VUI design guidelines into five themes. Additionally, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 smart speaker users to understand their use and non-use of the technology. From the interviews, we distill four design challenges that contribute the most to non-use. Based on their (non-)use, we identify four opportunity spaces for designers to explore such as focusing on information support while multitasking (cooking, driving, childcare, etc), incorporating users' mental models for smart speakers, and integrating calm design principles.