Proactivity in the TV Context: Understanding the Relevance and Characteristics of Proactive Behaviours in Voice Assistants

Abstract

In the context of Television (TV), intelligent voice assistants are still mainly based on reactive behaviours, only responding to users' requests. However, the addition of proactivity in TV assistants could have the potential to reduce the user-assistant interaction effort and bring an additional "human" layer, leading to a more organic adoption of these systems. Within this framework, this paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the relevance of a set of proactive scenarios for TV and get clues on how to design these behaviours to be efficient and avoid intrusion feelings. To this end, focus groups were conducted to discuss the conceptualised scenarios. The results showed that most of the idealized scenarios were relevant for the participants and that they will be positive if some characteristics can be pre-configured regarding the type of communication and intrusion of proactive suggestions.