Learnability Assessment of Speech-Based Intelligent Personal Assistants by Older Adults.

Older adults often have problems and difficulties with adopting technologies but the popularity of technology usage among older adults had increased significantly in recent years. Separately, Speech-Based Intelligent Personal Assistants (sIPA) or Voice Assistants (VA) have shown formidable promise in the successful aging and well-being of older adults. An in-depth learnability assessment of sIPAs’ for the elderly will provide practitioners in this domain to formulate new research outputs and studies to counter learnability issues incurred by older adults. The aim of this paper is to investigate the sIPA learnability issues from an older adult’s perspective. The research provides two separate studies to assess the learnability issues that older adults face while adopting sIPA. With prior Institutional Review Board’s (IRB) approval, Study 1 demonstrates Usability Scale Studies by utilizing System Usability Scale (SUS) and reported quantitative SUS value with comprehensive discussion. Study 2 provides an Interview Study with older adults where the goal was to investigate how older adults learn to use and adopt sIPAs’ in their lives through a qualitative approach. Both Study 1 and Study 2 concluded older adults have learnability issues regarding the adoption of sIPAs’ in their daily life. The finding concluded an average SUS score of 62.5. With a minimum SUS value being 35 and a maximum SUS value of 92.5 thus reaffirming that while some did find using sIPA easy, several others faced severe difficulties. The qualitative study concluded that older adults usually take aid from peers, family members, and the internet to tackle learnability issues thus suggesting their eagerness to learn and accept new technology for daily use. A comprehensive discussion was incorporated to validate and contrast preceding studies with our findings followed by pointing out the limitations of our work and future scopes of research which includes extended and prolonged longitudinal studies or through incorporating a larger sample size of a different demographic of a similar age group.