Using Co-Design to Examine How Children Conceptualize Intelligent Interfaces

Prior work has shown that intelligent user interfaces (IUIs) that use modalities such as speech, gesture, and writing pose challenges for children due to their developing cognitive and motor skills. Research has focused on improving recognition and accuracy by accommodating children’s specific interaction behaviors. Understanding children’s expectations of IUIs is also important to decrease the impact of recognition errors that occur. To understand children’s conceptual model of IUIs, we completed four consecutive participatory design sessions on designing IUIs with an emphasis on error detection and correction. We found that, while children think of interactive systems in terms of both user input and behavior and system output and behavior, they also propose ideas that require advanced system intelligence, e.g., context and conversation. Our work contributes new understanding of how children conceptualize IUIs and new methods for error detection and correction, and will inform the design of future IUIs for children to improve their experience.