Erroneous reactions of voice assistants

Authors: Lea Kisser, Ingo Siegert

Abstract:

Voice assistants are increasingly dominating everyday life and represent an easy way to perform various tasks with minimal effort. The areas of application for voice assistants are diverse and range from answering simple information questions to processing complex topics and controlling various tasks. However, current voice assistants very quickly reach their limits in everyday operation, as individual differences in their use, especially in the formulation of requests, encounter a uniform way of providing information. This is especially evident when voice assistants respond differently than expected by the user. These “erroneous reactions” are responded to with individually different strategies by the users regarding the content, but also lexical and prosodic variations. In the present contribution, we rely for the first time on a large data collection (approx. 40h) in which a large number of users interact with a voice assistant in a non-laboratory setting. Specifically, we focus on interactions with incorrect responses from the system. Thereby Incorrect responses are understood to be system messages that contain an error message or that failed to appear at all.