Designing for Harm Reduction: Communication Repair for Multicultural Users' Voice Interactions

Voice assistants' inability to serve people-of-color and non-native English speakers has largely been documented as a quality-of-service harm. However, little work has investigated what downstream harms propagate from this poor service. How does poor usability materially manifest and affect users' lives? And what interaction designs might help users recover from these effects? We identify 6 downstream harms that propagate from quality-of-service harms in voice assistants. Through interviews and design activities with 16 multicultural participants, we unveil these 6 harms, outline how multicultural users uniquely personify their voice assistant, and suggest how these harms and personifications may affect their interactions. Lastly, we employ techniques from psychology on communication repair to contribute suggestions for harm-reducing repair that may be implemented in voice technologies. Our communication repair strategies include: identity affirmations (intermittent frequency), cultural sensitivity, and blame redirection. This work shows potential for a harm-repair framework to positively influence voice interactions.Comment: 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24

Researching interactions between humans and machines: methodological challenges

Communication scholars are increasingly concerned with interactions between humans and communicative agents. These agents, however, are considerably different from digital or social media: They are designed and perceived as life-like communication partners (i.e., as “communicative subjects”), which in turn poses distinct challenges for their empirical study. Hence, in this paper, we document, discuss, and evaluate potentials and pitfalls that typically arise for communication scholars when investigating simulated or non-simulated interactions between humans and chatbots, voice assistants, or social robots. In this paper, we focus on experiments (including pre-recorded stimuli, vignettes and the “Wizard of Oz”-technique) and field studies. Overall, this paper aims to provide guidance and support for communication scholars who want to empirically study human-machine communication. To this end, we not only compile potential challenges, but also recommend specific strategies and approaches. In addition, our reflections on current methodological challenges serve as a starting point for discussions in communication science on how meaning-making between humans and machines can be investigated in the best way possible, as illustrated in the concluding section

Design Recommendations Based on Speech Analysis for Disability-Friendly Interfaces for the Control of a Home Automation Environment

The objective of this paper is to describe the study on speech interaction mode for home automation control of equipment by impaired people for an inclusive housing. The study is related to the HIP HOPE project concerning a building of 19 inclusive housing units. 7 participants with different types of disabilities were invited to carry out use cases using voice and touch control. Only the results obtained on the voice interaction mode through the Amazon voice assistant are reported here. The results show, according to the type of handicap, the success rates in the speech recognition of the command emitted on the equipment and highlight the errors related to the formulation, the noisy environment, the intelligible speech, the speech segmentation and the bad synchronization of the audio channel opening

Machine Body Language: Expressing a Smart Speaker’s Activity with Intelligible Physical Motion

People’s physical movement and body language implicitly convey what they think and feel, are doing or are about to do. In contrast, current smart speakers miss out on this richness of body language, primarily relying on voice commands only. We present QUBI, a dynamic smart speaker that leverages expressive physical motion – stretching, nodding, turning, shrugging, wiggling, pointing and leaning forwards/backwards – to convey cues about its underlying behaviour and activities. We conducted a qualitative Wizard of Oz lab study, in which 12 participants interacted with QUBI in four scripted scenarios. From our study, we distilled six themes: (1) mirroring and mimicking motions; (2) body language to supplement voice instructions; (3) anthropomorphism and personality; (4) audio can trump motion; (5) reaffirming uncertain interpretations to support mutual understanding; and (6) emotional reactions to QUBI’s behaviour. From this, we discuss design implications for future smart speakers

How to Convey Resilience: Towards A Taxonomy for Conversational Agent Breakdown Recovery Strategies

Conversational agents (CAs) have permeated our everyday lives in the past decade. Yet, the CAs we encounter today are far from perfect as they are still prone to breakdowns. Studies have shown that breakdowns have an immense impact on the user-CA relationship, user satisfaction, and retention. Therefore, it is important to investigate how to react and recover from breakdowns appropriately so that failures do not impair the CA experience lastingly. Examples for recovery strategies are the assumption of the most likely user intent (CA self-repair) or to ask for clarification (user-repair). In this paper, we iteratively develop a taxonomy to classify breakdown recovery strategies based on studies from scholarly literature and experiements with productive CA instances, and identify the current best practices described using our taxonomy. We aim to synthesize, structure and further the knowledge on breakdown handling and to provide a common language to describe recovery strategies

FNP led Mobile Health Services for the Homeless population

A small percentage of the U.S. population uses the greatest portion of the healthcare services. Homeless people are often such a group of “super-utilizers” of the healthcare system. Due to multiple medical and psychosocial conditions, people experiencing homelessness face numerous barriers to accessing healthcare, thus leading increased utilization of hospitals and emergency departments (EDs) services. Many of these events are preventable through improved primary care interventions. The literature on Respite/Recuperative Care, Transitional Care, and Mobile Health interventions have shown effectiveness in providing safe and quality care to homeless individuals during the critical transitional period post hospital discharge while also reducing the readmission rates to hospitals and EDs. The goal of this DNP project was to establish a Mobile Health Services program and function as a part of a larger Recuperative Care pilot program for Marin County\u27s homeless population. The partnership between the University of San Francisco School of Nursing and Health Professions (USF-SONHP) and local organizations in Marin endeavored to improve the quality of care for the homeless population and reduce rehospitalizations and ED visits. This goal was accomplished through the successful implementation of the pilot project. Outcome evaluation demonstrated that the project team was able to prevent rehospitalization in all eight patients that enrolled in the program. These results also showed a potential for a significant positive financial impact on the overall healthcare system by reducing utilization rates of EDs and hospitals and costs associated with i

The Degree to Which Secondary School Students in Jordan Possess Digital Citizenship Skills

The purpose of this study was to identify the degree to which secondary school students in Jordan possess digital citizenship skills and to identify the extent of statistically significant differences attributed to variables: gender, family monthly income, education system. The researcher used the descriptive survey analysis approach to conduct the study; the study tool (A test) was prepared consisting of (52) items and they were classified according to the nine elements of digital citizenship as follows: digital literacy, digital etiquette, digital laws, digital health and wellness, digital access, digital communications, digital security, digital commerce, digital rights and responsibilities. After verifying the test validity and reliability, it was distributed to the study sample consisting of (456) male and female students, they were chosen by the stratified randomized method. The study found that the degree to which secondary school students in Jordan possessed digital citizenship skills was medium, and the results of the study showed statistically significant differences attributed to the gender and for the benefit of females, and the results indicated that there were statistically significant differences attributed to the income and for the benefit of students who belong to families whose monthly income exceeds 1250 Dinars, and the results indicated that there were statistically significant differences attributed to the education system and for the benefit of students in the international system. The study recommended the introduction of a digital citizenship curriculum in schools and endorsing it within the educational plans and path