What Are You Talking To?: Understanding Children's Perceptions of Conversational Agents

Conversational agents (CAs) available in smart phones or smart speakers play an increasingly important role in young children's technological landscapes and life worlds. While a handful of studies have documented children's natural interactions with CAs, little is known about children's perceptions of CAs. To fill this gap, we examined three- to six-year-olds' perceptions of CAs' animate/artifact domain membership and properties, as well as their justifications for these perceptions. We found that children sometimes take a more nuanced position and spontaneously attribute both artifact and animate properties to CAs or view them as neither artifacts nor animate objects. This study extends current research on children's perceptions of intelligent artifacts by adding CAs as a new genre of study and provides some underlying knowledge that may guide the development of CAs to support young children's cognitive and social development.