EasyAsk: An In-App Contextual Tutorial Search Assistant for Older Adults with Voice and Touch Inputs

An easily accessible tutorial is crucial for older adults to use mobile applications (apps) on smartphones. However, older adults often struggle to search for tutorials independently and efficiently. Through a formative study, we investigated the demands of older adults in seeking assistance and identified patterns of older adults' behaviors and verbal questions when seeking help for smartphone-related issues. Informed by the findings from the formative study, we designed EasyAsk, an app-independent method to make tutorial search accessible for older adults. This method was implemented as an Android app. Using EasyAsk, older adults can obtain interactive tutorials through voice and touch whenever they encounter problems using smartphones. To power the method, EasyAsk uses a large language model to process the voice text and contextual information provided by older adults, and another large language model to search for the tutorial. Our user experiment, involving 18 older participants, demonstrated that EasyAsk helped users obtain tutorials correctly in 98.94% of cases, making tutorial search accessible and natural.