Understanding User Preferences of Voice Assistant Answer Structures for Personal Health Data Queries

Voice assistants (VAs) are becoming ubiquitous within daily life, residing in homes, personal smart-devices, vehicles, and many other technologies. Designed for seamless natural language interaction, VAs empower users to ask questions and execute tasks without relying on graphical or tactile interfaces. A promising avenue for VAs is to allow people to ask personal health data questions. However, this functionality is currently not widely available and answer preferences to such questions have not been studied. We implemented a pseudo-VA that handles personal health data questions, answering in three unique styles: minimal, keyword, and full sentence. In two online user studies, 82 unique participants interacted with our VA, asking varying personal health data questions and ranking answer structures given. Our results show a strong preference for full sentence responses throughout. We find that even though full sentence answers have the longest mean response time, they are still found to provide high quality and optimal behaviour, while also being comprehensible and efficient. Furthermore, participants reported that for personal health question and answering, VAs should provide technical and efficient interactions rather than being social.