Understanding Circumstances for Desirable Proactive Behaviour of Voice Assistants: The Proactivity Dilemma
Abstract
The next major evolutionary stage for voice assistants will be their capability to initiate interactions by themselves. However, to design proactive interactions, it is crucial to understand whether and when this behaviour is considered useful and how desirable it is perceived for different social contexts or ongoing activities. To investigate people’s perspectives on proactivity and appropriate circumstances for it, we designed a set of storyboards depicting a variety of proactive actions in everyday situations and social settings and presented them to 15 participants in interactive interviews. Our findings suggest that, although many participants see benefits in agent proactivity, such as for urgent or critical issues, there are concerns about interference with social activities in multi-party settings, potential loss of agency, and intrusiveness. We discuss our implications for designing voice assistants with desirable proactive features.
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Participants co-writing with an LLM found that seeing the LLM's suggestions was helpful even when they did not implement them.
“For example, participants co-writing with an LLM found that seeing the LLM's suggestions was helpful even when they did not implement them [207].”
From The Metacognitive Demands and Opportunities of Generative AI (2024) · cites this paper as [207]
Cites
Vasileiou, K., Barnett, J., Thorpe, S., & Young, T. (2018) · BMC Medical Research Methodology · doi:10.1186/s12874-018-0594-7 · Cited by 3,115 · see citing works
Voice Interfaces in Everyday Life
Porcheron, M., Fischer, J. E., Reeves, S., & Sharples, S. (2018) · Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3173574.3174214 · Cited by 717 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Since today’s conversations with voice assistants are highly constrained, task-oriented, and impersonal [8–10, 12, 22, 29], proactive interactions in such devices could open up new opportunities and potentially empower a broad range of applications [42].”
BackgroundLau, J., Zimmerman, B., & Schaub, F. (2018) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3274371 · Cited by 568 · see citing works
What Makes a Good Conversation?: Challenges in Designing Truly Conversational Agents
Clark, L., Pantidi, N., Cooney, O., Doyle, P., Garaialde, D., Edwards, J., Spillane, B., Gilmartin, E., Murad, C., Munteanu, C., et al. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3290605.3300705 · Cited by 461 · see citing works
At Your Service: Designing Voice Assistant Personalities to Improve Automotive User Interfaces
Braun, M., Mainz, A., Chadowitz, R., Pfleging, B., & Alt, F. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3290605.3300270 · Cited by 182 · see citing works
Mapping Perceptions of Humanness in Intelligent Personal Assistant Interaction
Doyle, P. R., Edwards, J., Dumbleton, O., Clark, L., & Cowan, B. R. (2019) · Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services · doi:10.1145/3338286.3340116 · Cited by 100 · see citing works
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The Metacognitive Demands and Opportunities of Generative AI
Tankelevitch, L., Kewenig, V., Simkute, A., Scott, A. E., Sarkar, A., Sellen, A., & Rintel, S. (2024) · Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3613904.3642902 · Cited by 280 · see citing works
Wei, C. Z., Kim, Y.-H., & Kuzminykh, A. (2023) · Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces · doi:10.1145/3571884.3597139 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
Mahmood, A., Wang, J., & Huang, C.-M. (2026) · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing · doi:10.1145/3796236 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
- Authors
- Zargham, N., Reicherts, L., Bonfert, M., Voelkel, S. T., Schoening, J., Malaka, R., & Rogers, Y.
- Affiliations
- University of Bremen (DE)
- University College London (GB)
- LMU Munich, Germany
- University of St.Gallen (CH)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2022-07-26
- Pages
- 1-14
- OpenAlex
- W4295955444
- Cited by
- 84
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 31 · 2023: 18
- FWCI
- 12.80
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) (publishedVersion)
- Alexandria (UniSG) (University of St.Gallen) (acceptedVersion)
- Alexandria (UniSG) (University of St.Gallen) (submittedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Keywords
- voice assistants, proactive behavior, user perception, social environment, intrusiveness, loss of agency, storyboards, human-agent interaction
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