Proactive behavior in voice assistants: A systematic review and conceptual model
Journal
Computers in Human Behavior Reports
ISSN
2451-9588
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2024
Author(s)
Caterina Bérubé
;
;
Rasita Vinay
;
Alexa Geiger
;
Tobias Budig
;
Aashish Bhandari
;
Catherine Rachel Pe Benito
;
Nathan Ibarcena
;
Olivia Pistolese
;
Pan Li
;
Abdullah Bin Sawad
;
;
Christoph Stettler
;
Bronwyn Hemsley
;
Shlomo Berkovsky
;
;
A. Baki Kocaballi
Abstract
Voice assistants (VAs) are increasingly integrated into everyday activities and tasks, raising novel challenges for users and researchers. One emergent research direction concerns proactive VAs, who can initiate interaction without direct user input, offering unique benefits including efficiency and natural interaction. Yet, there is a lack of review studies synthesizing the current knowledge on how proactive behavior has been implemented in VAs and under what conditions proactivity has been found more or less suitable. To this end, we conducted a systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist. We searched for articles in the ACM Digital Library, IEEExplore, and PubMed, and included primary research studies reporting user evaluations of proactive VAs, resulting in 21 studies included for analysis. First, to characterize proactive behavior in VAs we developed a novel conceptual model encompassing context, initiation, and action components: Activity/status emerged as the primary contextual element, direct initiation was more common than indirect initiation, and suggestions were the primary action observed. Second, proactive behavior in VAs was predominantly explored in domestic and in-vehicle contexts, with only safety-critical and emergency situations demonstrating clear benefits for proactivity, compared to mixed findings for other scenarios. The paper concludes with a summary of the prevailing knowledge gaps and potential research avenues.
Language
English
Keywords
Human-agent interaction
Proactivity
Voice assistants
User experience
Systematic review
Refereed
yes
Division(s)