I was fortunate to collaborate with recent UCI graduate, Ying Xu, from the UCI School of Education on this exciting study of voice-based communication apps targeting children. When we compared recommended adult-child communication patterns for building early literacy skills with those currently available through voice interfaces, we find the latter very much lacking. Check out our video preview and full paper for design recommendations.

Xu, Y., Branham, S.M., Deng, X., Collins, P., Warschauer, M. “Are Current Voice Interfaces Designed to Support Children’s Language Development?” In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), Online Virtual Conference (originally Yokohama, Japan), May 8-13, 2021. (acceptance rate: 26%)