Proactive behavior in voice assistants: A systematic review and conceptual model

• Published in: Computers in human behavior reports 2024-05, Vol.14, p.100411, Article 100411
• Main Authors: Bérubé, Caterina, Nißen, Marcia, Vinay, Rasita, Geiger, Alexa, Budig, Tobias, Bhandari, Aashish, Pe Benito, Catherine Rachel, Ibarcena, Nathan, Pistolese, Olivia, Li, Pan, Sawad, Abdullah Bin, Fleisch, Elgar, Stettler, Christoph, Hemsley, Bronwyn, Berkovsky, Shlomo, Kowatsch, Tobias, Kocaballi, A. Baki
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: conversational agents; Human-agent interaction; proactive behavior; Proactivity; Systematic review; User experience; Voice assistants; voice-based agents
• ISSN: 2451-9588; 2451-9588
• DOI: 10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100411

Voice assistants (VAs) are increasingly integrated into everyday activities and tasks, raising novel challenges for users and researchers. One emergent research direction concerns proactive VAs, who can initiate interaction without direct user input, offering unique benefits including efficiency and natural interaction. Yet, there is a lack of review studies synthesizing the current knowledge on how proactive behavior has been implemented in VAs and under what conditions proactivity has been found more or less suitable. To this end, we conducted a systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist. We searched for articles in the ACM Digital Library, IEEExplore, and PubMed, and included primary research studies reporting user evaluations of proactive VAs, resulting in 21 studies included for analysis. First, to characterize proactive behavior in VAs we developed a novel conceptual model encompassing context, initiation, and action components: Activity/status emerged as the primary contextual element, direct initiation was more common than indirect initiation, and suggestions were the primary action observed. Second, proactive behavior in VAs was predominantly explored in domestic and in-vehicle contexts, with only safety-critical and emergency situations demonstrating clear benefits for proactivity, compared to mixed findings for other scenarios. The paper concludes with a summary of the prevailing knowledge gaps and potential research avenues. •Systematic review of proactive behavior in voice assistants (n = 21 studies).•Novel conceptual model allows to characterize proactive behavior in VAs.•Only safety-critical/emergency situations show clear benefits for proactivity.•Proactive voice assistants still represent a nascent area.•Review identifies research gaps and avenues.