Voice Agents Supporting High-Quality Social Play
Abstract
While the design of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) has mostly focused on applications for adults, VUIs also provide potential advantages for young children in enabling concurrent interactions with the physical and social world. Current applications for young children focus mostly on media playing, answering questions, and highly-structured activities. There is an opportunity to go beyond these applications by using VUIs to support less structured, developmentally appropriate activities. In this paper, we describe our first step in pursuing this opportunity through an exploration of voice agents to facilitate high-quality social play guided by a partnership with eight 3-4 year old children. During 24 design sessions, we explored making voice agents tangible and enabling children to control what voice agents say. After analyzing the sessions, we learned voice agents could help keep children socially engaged in play and children liked incorporating the agents with the physical aspects of their play. On the other hand, enabling children to control the voice agents caused distractions from play.
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Voice interfaces assist children in maintaining attention and dismantle literacy barriers by eliminating the need for written text.
“They not only assist children in maintaining attention [45] but also dismantle literacy barriers by eliminating the need for written text [14].”
From ChatScratch: An AI-Augmented System Toward Autonomous Visual Programming Learning for Children Aged 6-12 (2024) · cites this paper as [45]
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- Authors
- Pantoja, L. S., Diederich, K., Crawford, L., & Hourcade, J. P.
- Affiliations
- University of Iowa (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-06-12
- Pages
- 314-325
- OpenAlex
- W2948200239
- Cited by
- 35
- References
- 55
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 8
- FWCI
- 6.19
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (99999.013579/2013-04)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Keywords
- voice assistants, voice user interface, social play, young children, early childhood technology, co-design with children
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