skip to main content
10.1145/3365610.3365627acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmumConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Differences between smart speakers and graphical user interfaces for music search considering gender effects

Published: 26 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The ubiquitous availability of smart speakers allows hands- and eyes-free interaction through Voice User Interfaces (VUIs). Control-ling music playback is the most commonly used feature of VUIs. Previous work investigated how users naturally interact with smart speakers and suggested that users' gender could affect the devices' usability. The usability of commercial devices compared to other interactive systems and the effects of users' gender is, however, unclear. Therefore, we conducted a study with 20 participants using an Amazon Echo Dot and a laptop device. Participants searched for artists and titles using a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a VUI. In addition, they performed different tasks such as saving a song in a playlist or adding songs into a queue. The analysis revealed that the VUI provides significantly lower usability because it lacks features, requires higher mental effort, and provides confusing answers. In contrast to previous concerns, the analysis did not reveal significant device×gender effects.

References

[1]
Rachel Adams and Nora Ni Loideain. 2019. Addressing Indirect Discrimination and Gender Stereotypes in AI Virtual Personal Assistants: The Role of International Human Rights Law. In Annual Cambridge International Law Conference 2019, New Technologies: New Challenges for Democracy and International Law. SSRN, 21.
[2]
Frank Bentley, Chris Luvogt, Max Silverman, Rushani Wirasinghe, Brooke White, and Danielle Lottridge. 2018. Understanding the Long-Term Use of Smart Speaker Assistants. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 2, 3, Article 91 (Sept. 2018), 24 pages.
[3]
Su Lin Blodgett and Brendan O'Connor. 2017. Racial Disparity in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study of Social Media African-American English. CoRR abs/1707.00061 (2017), 4. arXiv:1707.00061 http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00061
[4]
Ian Bogost. 2018. Sorry, Alexa Is Not a Feminist. The Atlantic (2018). https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/sorry-alexa-is-not-a-feminist/551291
[5]
Jennifer Breslin and Rachel Pollack. 2019. I'd blush if I could: closing gender divides in digital skills through education. UNESCO Programme and Meeting Document, Chapter The rise of gendered AI and its troubling repercussions, 85--145. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.locale=en
[6]
John Brooke. 1996. SUS: A quick and dirty usability scale. Usability Evaluation in Industry 194 (1996), 189--194.
[7]
G. E. Dahl, D. Yu, L. Deng, and A. Acero. 2012. Context-Dependent Pre-Trained Deep Neural Networks for Large-Vocabulary Speech Recognition. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 20, 1 (Jan 2012), 30--42.
[8]
Tilman Dingler, Rufat Rzayev, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, and Niels Henze. 2018. Designing Consistent Gestures Across Device Types: Eliciting RSVP Controls for Phone, Watch, and Glasses. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 419, 12 pages.
[9]
Editorial. 2019. The Guardian view on female voice assistants: not OK, Google. The Guardian (Jun 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/the-guardian-view-on-female-voice-assistants-not-ok-google
[10]
Yang Gao, Zhengyu Pan, Honghao Wang, and Guanling Chen. 2018. Alexa, My Love: Analyzing Reviews of Amazon Echo. In 2018 IEEE SmartWorld, Ubiquitous Intelligence Computing, Advanced Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing Communications, Cloud Big Data Computing, Internet of People and Smart City Innovation. IEEE, 372--380.
[11]
Ido Guy. 2016. Searching by Talking: Analysis of Voice Queries on Mobile Web Search. In Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA.
[12]
Florian Habler, Valentin Schwind, and Niels Henze. 2019. Effects of Smart Virtual Assistants' Gender and Language. In Proceedings of Mensch Und Computer 2019 (MuC'19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 469--473.
[13]
Charles Hannon. 2016. Gender and Status in Voice User Interfaces. Interactions 23, 3 (April 2016), 34--37.
[14]
Sandra G. Hart. 2006. Nasa-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX); 20 Years Later. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 50, 9 (2006), 904--908.
[15]
Sandra G. Hart and Lowell E. Staveland. 1988. Development of NASA-TLX (Task Load Index): Results of empirical and theoretical research. Vol. 52. Elsevier, 139--183.
[16]
Geoffrey Hinton, Li Deng, Dong Yu, George Dahl, Abdel-rahman Mohamed, Navdeep Jaitly, Andrew Senior, Vincent Vanhoucke, Patrick Nguyen, Tara Sainath, and Brian Kingsbury. 2012. Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Speech Recognition: The Shared Views of Four Research Groups. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 29, 6 (2012), 82--97.
[17]
Fabian Hoffmann, Miriam Ida Tyroller, Felix Wende, and Niels Henze. 2019. User-Defined Voice Commands, Display Interactions and Mid-Air Gestures for Smart Home Tasks. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2019). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7.
[18]
Jiepu Jiang, Wei Jeng, and Daqing He. 2013. How Do Users Respond to Voice Input Errors?: Lexical and Phonetic Query Reformulation in Voice Search. In Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 143--152.
[19]
Jie Kang, Kyle Condiff, Shuo Chang, Joseph A. Konstan, Loren Terveen, and F. Maxwell Harper. 2017. Understanding How People Use Natural Language to Ask for Recommendations. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 229--237.
[20]
Clare-Marie Karat, Christine Halverson, Daniel Horn, and John Karat. 1999. Patterns of Entry and Correction in Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition Systems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '99). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 568--575.
[21]
Alison Duncan Kerr. 2018. Alexa and the Promotion of Oppression. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Celebration of Women in Computing (womENcourage '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://womencourage.acm.org/2018/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/womENcourage_2018_paper_54.pdf
[22]
Nicole Kobie. 2019. Voice assistants may be less likely to understand women. New Scientist 242 (05 2019), 15.
[23]
Cole Christopher Maita. 2018. An Exploratory Study on Consumer Perceptions of Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Smart Speakers. https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Maita_Cole%20Spring%202018%20Thesis.pdf
[24]
Chelsea Myers, Anushay Furqan, Jessica Nebolsky, Karina Caro, and Jichen Zhu. 2018. Patterns for How Users Overcome Obstacles in Voice User Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 6, 7 pages.
[25]
Chelsea M. Myers, Anushay Furqan, and Jichen Zhu. 2019. The Impact of User Characteristics and Preferences on Performance with an Unfamiliar Voice User Interface. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 47, 9 pages.
[26]
Chidera Obinali. 2019. The Perception of Gender in Voice Assistants. In Proceedings of the Southern Association for Information Systems Conference. 6. https://aisel.aisnet.org/sais2019/39
[27]
Jennifer Pearson, Simon Robinson, Thomas Reitmaier, Matt Jones, Shashank Ahire, Anirudha Joshi, Deepak Sahoo, Nimish Maravi, and Bhakti Bhikne. 2019. StreetWise: Smart Speakers vs Human Help in Public Slum Settings. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 96, 13 pages.
[28]
Amanda Purington, Jessie G. Taft, Shruti Sannon, Natalya N. Bazarova, and Samuel Hardman Taylor. 2017. "Alexa is My New BFF": Social Roles, User Satisfaction, and Personification of the Amazon Echo. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2853--2859.
[29]
Katyanna Quach. 2019. Voice recognition tech is naturally sexist. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/14/voice_recognition_systems_are_naturally_sexist/
[30]
Valentin Schwind and Niels Henze. 2018. Gender- and Age-related Differences in Designing the Characteristics of Stereotypical Virtual Faces. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 463--475.
[31]
Valentin Schwind, Pascal Knierim, Cagri Tasci, Patrick Franczak, Nico Haas, and Niels Henze. 2017. "These Are Not My Hands!": Effect of Gender on the Perception of Avatar Hands in Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1577--1582.
[32]
Alex Sciuto, Arnita Saini, Jodi Forlizzi, and Jason I. Hong. 2018. "Hey Alexa, What's Up?": A Mixed-Methods Studies of In-Home Conversational Agent Usage. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 857--868.
[33]
Aaron Springer and Henriette Cramer. 2018. "Play PRBLMS": Identifying and Correcting Less Accessible Content in Voice Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--13.
[34]
Rachael Tatman. 2017. Gender and Dialect Bias in YouTube's Automatic Captions. In Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics, Valencia, Spain, 53--59.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Differences between smart speakers and graphical user interfaces for music search considering gender effects

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM Other conferences
        MUM '19: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia
        November 2019
        462 pages
        ISBN:9781450376242
        DOI:10.1145/3365610
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 26 November 2019

        Permissions

        Request permissions for this article.

        Check for updates

        Author Tags

        1. gender
        2. graphical user interface
        3. music search
        4. smart speaker
        5. voice user interface

        Qualifiers

        • Research-article

        Conference

        MUM 2019

        Acceptance Rates

        Overall Acceptance Rate 190 of 465 submissions, 41%

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)20
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7
        Reflects downloads up to 07 Nov 2024

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all

        View Options

        Get Access

        Login options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        Media

        Figures

        Other

        Tables

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media