Designing Feedback for an Attentive Office

In modern offices, information devices abound. How do people conceptualize interaction with a large number of such devices? What makes an effective design of a verbal information-access system? With these questions in mind, we observed users in a futuristic office setting, where information is accessed via only verbal commands. Results suggest a mismatch between behavior and attitude: when speaking to individual devices, people treat the devices socially, but they do not feel as though they are interacting socially. No mismatch was found when people spoke to the room as a whole. This implies that attentive user interfaces ought to be designed so that people interact with a single entity