Exploring use cases and user perception of a proactive voice assistant in automated vehicles

Future development of in-vehicle voice assistants (VA) aims at more adaptive and interactive interaction with users. One focus area is the development of proactive behaviour of VA. With the changing role from driver to passenger in increasingly automated vehicles, new opportunities for interactions with assistants in the car arise. However, potential use cases for proactive VA in automated vehicles have not been investigated so far. We present our approach to brainstorm and prioritize use cases for a proactive VA based on a specific persona and user journey, involving experts and users. Secondly, we present user’s assessment and reflections on the prioritized use cases after experiencing them in a driving simulator study. The findings show that especially office-work related use cases that enable an efficient use of the ride time or offers contributing to user’s well-being receive high acceptance from users. The analysis of the qualitative feedback highlights that for a proactive VA adaptivity to the user’s behaviour and non-intrusive formulation of suggestions and questions is important. The study provides a starting point to investigate proactive behaviour of in-vehicle VA in more detail. The proposed approach for use case derivation can also be applied to other personas or different application domains of VA.