Overview:
Voice Conversational Agents (VCAs) are increasingly becoming part of our daily life. Calling them by their names can solve more than just a problem of efficiency in interaction between users and VCAs, but also can cast them as actors capable of playing a role in a relationship. However, due to the immature state of the technology and its related services, such relationships between users and VCAs can be limited in practice. To broaden the scope in designing different relationships, this study explores VCAs depicted in sci-fi movies. Sci-fi is not purely based on fantasy, but also is a social reflection on technology, which in turn can inspire design researchers to understand and speculate the complexity of VCAs. Through community sourcing with sci-fi enthusiasts, 43 Sci-fi VCAs were deduced. A movie event was also organized to discuss the role of VCAs. Finally, this paper presents several possible design insights for designing the role of VCAs.

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Methods: 

• Semi-Structured Interview

• Co-Design Workshop

• Crowdsourcing

• Thematic Analysis

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Results & Contribution: 

•  [to be updated]

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Collaborators & Acknowledgement: 

Rung-Huei Liang (supervisor), Lin-Lin Chen (supervisor), Yi-Ching (Janet) Huang (researcher), Jane Yung-Jen Hsu (researcher).  

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Publications:

Yu-Ting Cheng, Guo-Ling Tsai, Heng-An Lin, Yi-Ching Huang, Rung Huei Liang, and Lin-Lin Chen. 2019. Call Me by My Name: Exploring Roles of Sci-fi Voice Agents. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper LBW0138, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3313074