Attempts to Leverage Interaction Design to Mimic Emotional Care and Empathy-Based Feedback on Smart Speakers.

Noticing that many existing smart speakers in China are lack of good emotion experience, we explore Chinese users’ expectation about smart speakers through user research. Along with the increasing development of AI technologies, we found in our recent user experience studies that AI technologies could enable smart devices various human-like capabilities such as “speak”, “see”, and “body language”, which naturally provide users psychological perception that the smart devices have human characteristic during the interaction process. There are two major contributions in this paper. Firstly, we investigate and summarize the emotional care and empathy-based feedback in interpersonal communication, especially in the Chinese culture context. We surveyed some professional psychological counselors and observed their interactions with other individuals at the emotional connection level. In general, the feedback strategies from psychological counselors tend to make people comfortable and help counselors establish good relationships with others. Desk studies on networking skills and interpersonal communication followed then to summarize the characters and patterns of good communications in our daily life. Patterns and rules found in these investigations are transferred into emotion interaction design. For example, an expression of empathy by adding a certain tone in the voice of smart speakers. Secondly, we demonstrate how to leverage interaction design to mimic or enable emotional care and empathy-based feedback on smart speakers. We further validate our designs through two major user experiments.