Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21)
Abstract. We present a dialogue elicitation study to assess how users envision conversations with a perfect voice assistant (VA). In an online survey, N=205 participants were prompted with everyday scenarios, and wrote the lines of both user and VA in dialogues that they would imagine as perfect. We analysed the dialogues with text analytics and qualitative analysis, including number of words and turns, social aspects of conversation, implied VA capabilities, and the influence of user personality. The majority envisioned dialogues with a VA that is interactive and not purely functional; it is smart, proactive, and knows about the user. Attitudes diverged towards the assistant's role as well as it expressing humour and opinions. An exploratory analysis suggested a relationship with personality for these aspects, but correlations were low overall. We discuss implications for research and design of future voice assistants.