Druga S, Williams R, “Hey Google is it OK if I eat you?” Initial Explorations in Child-Agent Interaction, IDC Stanford, 2017

Abstract

How do children perceive and interact with autonomous technologies that are becoming more embedded in their daily lives? To answer this question we studied how 26 children (3-10 years old) interacted with these autonomous technologies: Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Anki‘s Cozmo, and NDI Development‘s Julie Chatbot. In the context of this paper, we refer to them as "agents." After interacting with these agents, children answered questions about trust, intelligence, social entity, personality, and engagement. We analyze children's interactions and responses and identify four themes: perceived intelligence, identity attribution, playfulness, and understanding. In the discussion, we address how different modalities of interaction may change the way children perceive intelligence and understand the world around them. We also propose a series of design considerations for future child-agent interactions around voice and prosody, interactive engagement and facilitating understanding.