On Hyper-local Conversational Agents in Urban Settings
12 June 2019
In the last decade, a large number of virtual assistants have been offered to the market. These conversational agents use vocal commands from the users to perform various personalized tasks that are constrained by the applications a user installs on her devices. We consider a brand new conversational agent in an outdoor setting that provides finely grained spatio-temporal service as opposed to personalized services. This hyper-local agent is embedded into the urban architecture rather than user devices and provide information about their whereabouts, providing a conversational experience. In this paper, we make a case for such an agent through two user studies. These studies suggest that the users would be willing to use such a system to better engage with the city they live in and present issues that need to be addressed.
