Article

"Alexa, Can You See Me?" Making Individual Personal Assistants for the Home Accessible to Deaf Consumers

Speech recognition technology advances have resulted in individual personal assistant devices that are voice-controlled, such as Alexa to become very popular and ubiquitous. They are inaccessible to Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) users, because of their reliance on spoken-modality input and output, who generally cannot interact with these devices and often use a visual language like American Sign Language (ASL). This study compared people using ASL and tablet applications that can communicate with AmazonEcho Show, in a limited domain. The study used the Amazon-Echo Show product and an android tablet. Participants were asked to fill out the survey about this interaction. The results were analyzed and recorded in this study. Quantitatively, participants equally preferred ASL and tablet interaction. However, qualitatively, participants preferred ASL over tablet interaction, as they reported that it felt more natural and quicker.

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