TY - GEN
T1 - Voice Design to Support Young Children's Agency in Child-Agent Interaction
AU - Hubbard, Layne
AU - Ding, Shanli
AU - Le, Vananh
AU - Kim, Pilyoung
AU - Yeh, Tom
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank all of the phenomenal children and families who participated in this research across Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Montana, New York, Oregon, and Texas. Funding for this research was provided by the Piton Foundation and the OpenIDEO Early Childhood Innovation Prize. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE 1650115, as well as the NSF National AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming (iSAT) under grant DRL 2019805. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the NSF.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Owner/Author.
PY - 2021/7/27
Y1 - 2021/7/27
N2 - Agency is essential to play. As we design conversational agents for early childhood, how might we increase the child-centeredness of our approaches? Giving children agency and control in choosing their agent representations might contribute to the overall playfulness of our designs. In this study with 33 children ages 4-5 years old, we engaged children in a creative storytelling interaction with conversational agents in stuffed animal embodiments. Young children conversed with the stuffed animal agents to tell stories about their creative play, engaging in question and answer conversation from 2 minutes to 24 minutes. We then interviewed the children about their perceptions of the agent's voice, and their ideas for agent voices, dialogues, and interactions. From babies to robot daddies, we discover three themes from children's suggestions: Family Voices, Robot Voices, and Character Voices. Additionally, children desire agents who (1) scaffold creative play in addition to storytelling, (2) foster personal, social, and emotional connections, and (3) support children's agency and control. Across these themes, we recommend design strategies to support the overall playful child-centeredness of conversational agent design.
AB - Agency is essential to play. As we design conversational agents for early childhood, how might we increase the child-centeredness of our approaches? Giving children agency and control in choosing their agent representations might contribute to the overall playfulness of our designs. In this study with 33 children ages 4-5 years old, we engaged children in a creative storytelling interaction with conversational agents in stuffed animal embodiments. Young children conversed with the stuffed animal agents to tell stories about their creative play, engaging in question and answer conversation from 2 minutes to 24 minutes. We then interviewed the children about their perceptions of the agent's voice, and their ideas for agent voices, dialogues, and interactions. From babies to robot daddies, we discover three themes from children's suggestions: Family Voices, Robot Voices, and Character Voices. Additionally, children desire agents who (1) scaffold creative play in addition to storytelling, (2) foster personal, social, and emotional connections, and (3) support children's agency and control. Across these themes, we recommend design strategies to support the overall playful child-centeredness of conversational agent design.
KW - agency
KW - child-agent interaction
KW - conversational agents
KW - creativity support
KW - play
KW - storytelling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85112297419&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3469595.3469604
DO - 10.1145/3469595.3469604
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85112297419
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, CUI 2021
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 3rd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, CUI 2021
Y2 - 27 July 2021 through 29 July 2021
ER -