Proactivity: The Next Step in Voice Assistants for the TV Ecosystem

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are increasingly present in people’s daily lives, with natural language interaction allowed by voice assistants improving the user experience. In the television ecosystem, the integration of voice assistants is also enabling the interaction with media devices in a globally more satisfying way. Additionally, the inclusion of proactive behaviours is considered to be one of the critical factors for the improvement of the user experience. To better understand this dimension of voice assistants, the present article analyses the proactivity concept and examples of voice assistants that incorporate proactive behaviours. Also, voice assistants have been analysed in the television ecosystem and it was realized a lack of systems presenting a real proactive behaviour able to assist users in a television context.