Designing everyday conversational agents for managing health and wellness: A study of alexa skills reviews

Ji Youn Shin, Jina Huh-Yoo

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Conversational agents have been developed for supporting a wide array of areas, including autonomous vehicles, decision making, and health behavior change. In the last few years, conversational agents increasingly became available as everyday technologies. This phenomenon enables opportunities for finding novel ways to support health and wellness in everyday contexts. By conducting a content analysis of 433 user reviews of Amazon Alexa's Skills, the goal of this study is two-fold: (1) Extract users' perceived strengths of conversational agents in everyday health and wellness management, (2) develop design heuristics for developing conversational agents for health and wellness. We found that the role of trustworthy content providers is critical during the adoption. The Skills enabled people to overcome logistical barriers to improving daily health and wellness routines. The findings also revealed the importance of transparency in the limitations of the Skill and how to better design command dialogues. We present the design heuristics of conversational agents, building on Nielsen's Usability Heuristics, and discuss implications for designing conversational agents that support health and wellness.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, PervasiveHealth 2020
Pages50-61
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781450375320
DOIs
StatePublished - 18 May 2020
Event14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, PervasiveHealth 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 6 Oct 20208 Oct 2020

Publication series

NamePervasiveHealth: Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare
ISSN (Print)2153-1633

Conference

Conference14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, PervasiveHealth 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period6/10/208/10/20

Keywords

  • Amazon Alexa
  • Conversational agent
  • Design
  • Design heuristics
  • Health
  • Smart speakers
  • User experience
  • Voice assistants
  • Voice user interfaces

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