Shashank Ahire
Michael Rohs
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we aim to draw attention towards wake words. Wake words are an integral part of every request addressed to Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs). Currently, a request made to an IPA is led by wake words, making a conversation with an IPA more tiresome than a conversation with a human being. The main question we pose in this paper is, whether we can eliminate the use of wake words at least in specific contexts. Based on our experience with IPAs we propose three less burdensome alternatives that avoid the need for speaking wake words in some cases. Based on these approaches we discuss how to design seamless conversations with IPAs.
- 2018. (1st world problem) "OK Google" is too much of a mouthful. https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/69ibyy/1st_world_problem_ok_google_is_too_much_of_a/Google Scholar
- 2018. Change Siri's name. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8319320Google Scholar
- 2018. People named Alexa. How has your life changed? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7rc7yq/people_named_alexa_how_has_your_life_changed/Google Scholar
- 2019. custom wake words. https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P00006zSt1JSAS/custom-wake-wordsGoogle Scholar
- 2019. From all the people named "Alexa" out there... Fuck you Amazon Echo! https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/98hufr/from_all_the_people_named_alexa_out_there_fuck/Google Scholar
- Frank Bentley, Chris Luvogt, Max Silverman, Rushani Wirasinghe, Brooke White, and Danielle Lottridge. 2018. Understanding the Long-Term Use of Smart Speaker Assistants. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 2, 3, Article Article 91 (Sept. 2018), 24 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3264901Google ScholarDigital Library
- Leigh Clark, Nadia Pantidi, Orla Cooney, Philip Doyle, Diego Garaialde, Justin Edwards, Brendan Spillane, Emer Gilmartin, Christine Murad, Cosmin Munteanu, Vincent Wade, and Benjamin R. Cowan. 2019. What Makes a Good Conversation? Challenges in Designing Truly Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article Paper 475, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300705Google ScholarDigital Library
- Benjamin R. Cowan, Nadia Pantidi, David Coyle, Kellie Morrissey, Peter Clarke, Sara Al-Shehri, David Earley, and Natasha Bandeira. 2017. "What Can i Help You with?": Infrequent Users' Experiences of Intelligent Personal Assistants. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article Article 43, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3098279.3098539Google ScholarDigital Library
- Josh Hendrickson. 2019. How Alexa Listens for Wake Words. Retrieved February 6, 2020 from https://www.howtogeek.com/427686/how-alexa-listens-for-wake-words/Google Scholar
- IEvangelist. 2019. Create custom keywords - Speech service - Azure Cognitive Services. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/speech-devices-sdk-create-kwsGoogle Scholar
- Ewa Luger and Abigail Sellen. 2016. "Like Having a Really Bad PA": The Gulf between User Expectation and Experience of Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 5286--5297. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858288Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kieren McCarthy. 2016. OK Google, Alexa, why can't I choose my own safe, er, wake word? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/05/google_why_cant_we_choose_wake_words/Google Scholar
- Tim Moynihan. 2017. Alexa and Google Home Record What You Say. But What Happens to That Data? https://www.wired.com/2016/12/alexa-and-google-record-your-voice/Google Scholar
- Annie O'Sullivan. 2018. Distraught Mom Pens Letter to Amazon CEO Claiming Daughter Named Alexa Is Constantly Bullied. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/distraught-family-pens-letter-to-amazon-over-bullying-issues-with-daughter-who-shares-name-with-alexa-device-jeff-bezos-ceo-massachusetts/1816730/Google Scholar
- Jennifer Pearson, Simon Robinson, Thomas Reitmaier, Matt Jones, Shashank Ahire, Anirudha Joshi, Deepak Sahoo, Nimish Maravi, and Bhakti Bhikne. 2019. StreetWise: Smart Speakers vs Human Help in Public Slum Settings. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article Paper 96, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300326Google ScholarDigital Library
- Simon Robinson, Jennifer Pearson, Shashank Ahire, Rini Ahirwar, Bhakti Bhikne, Nimish Maravi, and Matt Jones. 2018. Revisiting "Hole in the Wall" Computing: Private Smart Speakers and Public Slum Settings. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article Paper 498, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174072Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dave Smith. 2016. There's one big problem with Google Assistant: Saying 'OK Google' is super creepy. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-assistant-ok-google-is-super-creepy-2016- 10?r=DE&IR=TGoogle Scholar
- Damien Wilde. 2020. Some of the best alternative 'Hey Google' hotwords for Google Home. https://9to5google-com.cdn.ampprojeet.org/v/s/9to5google.com/2020/01/14/weird-hey-google-alternatives/amp/?usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D&_js_v=0.1#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2F9to5google.com%2F2020%2F01% 2F14%2Fweird-hey-google-alternatives%2FGoogle Scholar
Index Terms
- Tired of Wake Words?: Moving Towards Seamless Conversations with Intelligent Personal Assistants
Recommendations
Putting wake words to bed: We speak wake words with systematically varied prosody, but CUIs don't listen
CUI '21: Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces‘Wake words’ such as "Alexa" or "Hey Siri", as conversation design elements, mimic the interactionally rich ‘summons-answer’ sequence in natural conversation, but their function amounts to little more than a button-push: simply activating the interface. ...
Exploring Smart Speaker User Experience for People Who Stammer
ASSETS '22: Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and AccessibilitySpeech-enabled smart speakers are common devices used for numerous tasks in everyday life. While speech-enabled technologies are widespread, using one’s voice as a computing modality introduces new accessibility challenges for people with speech ...
Multimodal Activation: Awakening Dialog Robots without Wake Words
SIGIR '21: Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information RetrievalWhen talking to the dialog robots, users have to activate the robot first from the standby mode with special wake words, such as "Hey Siri", which is apparently not user-friendly. The latest generation of dialog robots have been equipped with advanced ...
Comments