Panel: Voice Assistants, UX Design and Research

In this panel, we discuss the challenges that are faced by HCI practitioners and researchers as they study how voice assistants (VA) are used on a daily basis. Voice has become a widespread and commercially viable interaction mechanism with the introduction of VAs such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, the Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana. Despite their prevalence, the design of VAs and their embeddedness with other personal technologies and daily routines have yet to be studied in detail. Making use of a roundtable, we will discuss these issues by providing a number of VA use scenarios that panel members will discuss. Some of the issues that researchers will discuss in this panel include: (1) obtaining VA data & privacy concerns around the processing and storage of user data; (2) the personalization of VAs and the user value derived from this interaction; and (3) the relevant UX work that reflects on the design of VAs?