At home with Alexa: A tale of two conversational agents

• Main Authors: Ureta, Jennifer C., Brito, Celina Iris, Dy, Jilyan Bianca, Santos, Kyle-Althea, Villaluna, Winfred Louie D., Ong, Ethel C.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2020
• Subjects: Chatbots; Voice computing; Storytelling; Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/13398
• Institution: De La Salle University

Voice assistants in mobile devices and smart speakers offer the potential of conversational agents as storytelling peers of children, especially those who may have limited proficiency in spelling and grammar. Despite their prevalence, however, the built-in automatic speech recognition features of voice interfaces have been shown to perform poorly on children’s speech, which may affect child-agent interaction. In this paper, we describe our experiments in deploying a conversational storytelling agent on two popular commercial voice interfaces - Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Through post-validation feedback from children and analysis of the captured conversation logs, we compare the challenges encountered by children when sharing their stories with these voice assistants. We also used the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy to provide a quantitative assessment of the text-to-speech transcription quality. We found that voice assistants’ short waiting time and the frequent yet misplaced interruptions during pauses disrupt the thinking process of children. Furthermore, disfluencies and grammatical errors that naturally occur in children’s speech affected the transcription quality.