The Unit and Size of Information Supporting Auditory Feedback for Voice User Interface

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the unit of information and the size of the unit for designing a voice user interface. Through two experiments, this study investigated what form the information (the unit of information) should take and what size of that (the size of unit) should be when people were provided information by voice interfaces. Participants were presented with a task to recall (OX quiz) by listening to and remembering information (based on an encyclopedia) provided by smart speakers. In Experiment 1, it was revealed that participants stored information in their memory span on a sentence-by-sentences basis to determine how much information they could remember. In Experiment 2, sentence-based information was presented in various sizes, and participants evaluated 17 information units consisting of up to nine words as their memory limit. This information unit-based voice interface design could help improve users’ memory performance and usability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Promotion funded by the Korean government (MSIP) (R0124-16-0002, Emotional Intelligence Technology to Infer Human Emotion and Carry on Dialogue Accordingly).

Notes on contributors

Min Chul Cha

Min Chul Cha is a PhD candidate in the Department of Information and Industrial Engineering at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. His research interests include voice user interfaces and usability/UX in smart devices.

Hyo Chang Kim

Hyo Chang Kim is a research scientist at the Stanford Center at Incheon Global Campus (SCIGC). He received his PhD in Industrial Engineering from Yonsei University. His research interests include usability/UX in HRI and autonomous vehicles.

Yong Gu Ji

Yong Gu Ji is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Yonsei University, where he directs the Interaction Design Laboratory. He received his PhD in Human Factors/HCI from Purdue University. His research interests include usability/UX in smart devices and self-driving vehicles.