Affordances and Constraints of Child-Voice Agent Interaction: A Scoping Review

Research has extensively explored the opportunities and challenges of children’s interaction with conversational technology that facilitates voice-based interactions. However, the literature lacks a coherent, synthesized, dedicated source on the affordances and constraints of designing child-voice agent (VA) interactions. To address this, we report the results of a scoping review of 42 articles. Our findings identified five design implications: VAs’ personalities/characters; mutual understanding between child and VA; involvement of child development theories starting from the early design process, and employing more participatory design methods and more inclusive approach to benefit from the technology for all children; and developing more open and transparent agents to protect children’s rights to support them to become informed users. Lastly, we point to research in playful voice interactions for children in diverse contexts as the next potential opportunity in the HCI-CCI field. We discuss these implications and imply future research directions related to them.