Examining the Potential for Conversational Exploratory Search Using a Smart Speaker Digital Assistant

Abhishek Kaushik, Gareth J. F. Jones

2023

Abstract

Online Digital Assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri are very popular and provide a range or services to their users, a key function is their ability to satisfy user information needs from the sources available to them. Users may often regard these applications as providing search services similar to Google type search engines. However, while it is clear that they are in general able to answer factoid questions effectively, it is much less obvious how well they support less specific or exploratory type search tasks. We describe an investigation examining the behaviour of the standard Amazon Alexa for exploratory search tasks. The results of our study show that it not effective in addressing these types of information needs. We propose extensions to Alexa designed to overcome these shortcomings. Our Custom Alexa application extends Alexa’s conversational functionality for exploratory search. A user study shows that our extended Alexa application both enables users to more successfully complete exploratory search tasks and is well accepted by our test users.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kaushik A. and J. F. Jones G. (2023). Examining the Potential for Conversational Exploratory Search Using a Smart Speaker Digital Assistant. In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2023) - Volume 2: HUCAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-634-7, SciTePress, pages 305-317. DOI: 10.5220/0011798700003417

in Bibtex Style

@conference{hucapp23,
author={Abhishek Kaushik and Gareth J. F. Jones},
title={Examining the Potential for Conversational Exploratory Search Using a Smart Speaker Digital Assistant},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2023) - Volume 2: HUCAPP},
year={2023},
pages={305-317},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011798700003417},
isbn={978-989-758-634-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2023) - Volume 2: HUCAPP
TI - Examining the Potential for Conversational Exploratory Search Using a Smart Speaker Digital Assistant
SN - 978-989-758-634-7
AU - Kaushik A.
AU - J. F. Jones G.
PY - 2023
SP - 305
EP - 317
DO - 10.5220/0011798700003417
PB - SciTePress