Explorations of Voice User Interfaces for 3 to 4 Year Old Children

The design of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) has mostly focused on applications for adults, but VUIs provide potential advantages to young children in enabling concurrent interactions with the physical and social world. Current applications for young children focus on media playing, answering questions, and highly-structured activities. There is an opportunity to go beyond these applications by using VUIs to support high-quality, creative social play. In this paper, we describe our first step in pursuing this opportunity with 24 design sessions guided by a partnership with eight 3 to 4 year old children. In a social play setting, we learned that children wanted to physically interact with the voice agents and VUIs could redirect behaviors and promote social interactions.